Monkey Fur

2011-10-11T14:58:00.000-04:00

I'm asking my students to make drawings based on maps, and in the process of researching images to show them online I came across some amazing stuff. Like this blog post about old caricature maps, which has these wonderful images, among many...

Fight/ Flight

2011-09-19T16:17:00.001-04:00

I just finished this piece, which I see as the second in a series I started with Pull, the last piece I did in this vein.

This one is called Fight/Flight, and you can see large images of it on my website.

There are lots of funny things on this piece, particularly this whole subplot featuring a megalomaniac ladybug who disses a bunch of poetry spouting guppies. The plot is circular: the lady bug flies across the center of the piece, meets various bugs who tell her about the art world, goes in to a crazy rant, reaches a peak of confidence, gets eaten by a frog, and resurfaces to fly again...

Here is part of the conversation about the art world.

The thing about having an edge is an allusion to an experience I had in Chelsea once. I was visiting New York from Florida, and a curator who liked my work sent me to see a famous gallerist, who told me, in what I truly remember as a Transylvanian accent, that I was doomed to failure because "here in New York we like our work with an edge. We like it to cut like a knife. "

The ladybug gets more and more worked up then goes in to an egotistical little song:

If you can't read that rant, the ladybug sings, "I am the cure for what ails you, the modern con-dition! Queeen of the kittycat, protector of puppies! Saving ass-thetics from the ignrnt guppies!"

The guppies, however, are very wise. They are quoting a favorite poem of mine, Danse Russe, by William Carlos Williams. The fish give credit where credit is due and then continue quoting the poem along the bottom of the piece.

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

The guppies say the lines of the poem along the bottom of the piece until the last line, when they are interrupted.

The frog attempts to eat the ladybug, but she lives to fly across the painting and begin again.

The piece is also bracketed by two more pieces of text. This text, in the upper right, is talking about the swan and the otter. "They were both so ambitious, so fond. Raised as brothers, they had developed wildly different adaptations in order to survive. The swan garnered orderly adoration, the otter's critical teeth longed for the new. What could be done but fight?"

In the upper right quadrant of the painting there's a little island where the inhabitants have built a tower from which they are launching a zeppelin.

Drawing otter fur makes me want to rename my blog.

Pull and The Victorian Mojo Explained

2011-06-25T08:57:00.000-04:00

I just got a new piece posted on my website- it's called Pull, and I'm quite happy with it. You can see it better by clicking the link above and going to the details, but I thought it was worth a blog post to write down some of the text in the image that's hard to see on the web.

A friend of mine who is a genius artist asked me what all the swans in my work were about recently, and I answered without any hesitation, "Beauty."
"Yeah, they're the thing we're supposed to think is beautiful," she said, "they're like the stand-in for beauty."
"For me," I said, "they're like chaotic, unrestrained beauty- visceral, like it or not, popular beauty."
And then I'm pretty sure she said, "They are beautiful, but they're goona eatcha."
I may just hope she said that.

Because that's what I'm interested in lately. I'm interested in the way that art constructs an elite around ideas of aesthetic difference, and the ways that commonplace beauty gets excluded from that dialogue. There's a lot of stuff about that in this piece.

The main text along the top of the piece says, "Placing my trust in the..."

...ruthless advance of spring."

The word advance looks like this:

My grandfather worked in oil fields, and I was thinking of old wooden oil rigs. There's some tiny text above the rig that says, "Flowers every year regardless of my bad attitude."

Speaking of which, this spring I went to my high school reunion and had a really wonderful time. I went to a great high school and was stunned to see that several of my classmates do seem to have gone on to run the world. Lovely people. Great education. But in true bad attitude fashion, I have bitten the hand that fed me and given a cockroach on this piece my high school sweater.

Along the left side of the piece there are a few big text sections. There is a floating woman saying, "Our ideals have stolen the wrong weaknesses."

When I was drawing that text I was thinking about how idealistically we have turned away from our weaknesses for aesthetic pleasures. Artists can be dumb about which kids of beauty they will admit to- we like our beauty separate from commercial culture. That's idealistic, but in reacting against exploitable images I think we've reacted against common experiences- we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I think we need to be able to look at swans, sunsets and each other without feeling like we're being freaking ironic. I kept thinking about that idea here:

The text in the lake says, "Has art abandoned us, left us distrustful of any vision of what we love, afraid that beauty in all but the most virtuously strict, stripped down, distant form is somehow shameful, stupid or crass?"

People ask me a lot about the Victorian thing I'm doing. It's partly about the way that I think we construct art world beauty now- I think that the prissiness that we have as a culture about acceptable forms of high culture aesthetics is very similar to the kind of prissiness that Victorian men had about women. There's a way in which I totally understand the Victorian male vision of sexuality. It's as if they think they are very logical, very serious, very smart, very known, and very dreary. So they organize and collect and categorize everything. They dress in black. And they think that sexuality and love is totally mysterious and out of control, so the women in that era are both caged and decorated- their clothes and position in society embody a fear of and longing for the other that is all about controlling the uncontrollable nature of desire. They cage it, decorate it, and demean it- make it seperate from power or any meaningful negotiation in society while making sure that they revere it in its pure form- Victorian men were all about the cult of the mother, and virtues were female...I think we do that with aesthetics, at least in high art.

We like disembodied beauty, and if we talk about aesthetic beauty that we can all access directly, there's an urge to either make sure it's radically logical, disembodied from normal visual experience and placed into a conceptual framework or, if it does reference something that's not radically distant from the average citizen's visual experience, to somehow demean it. I was once told (no kidding) by a hilariously accented dealer that "we in New York like our art with an edge..." I think sometimes that edge is the knife that cuts between the classes- there's a lot about class that explains why it is utterly sophisticated to make something that does not open itself up to common experience at all..

Sometimes I think that abstraction was a perfect American art movement, because it let us take our proto-Victorian impulses out on beauty- we could strip it of all attachment to politics, to mortality, to ourselves and each other and make it pure. I love abstraction- some of my best friends- but I also am interested in how truly radical it is to draw the figure these days. It's absurd. Art people often think that I must be stupid because I draw people's bodies. It's as if looking at each other has become a symbol of ignorance. That's what I mean about our ideals stealing the wrong weaknesses, too.

We are afraid of embodied beauty- we're afraid of beauty that is tied to people, to things that we can lose....Going to Rome, being steeped in all that Donatello and the baroque made me feel that. It's much easier to be a fat aging American in front of a Rothko than it is in front of that statue of Danae.

Our art of the last half century seems to me to be an art emphatically NOT of the body. Not the body, the story, the place, the family- it's an art of the mind, serious, logical, cerebral, dressed in black...I want to make the other art.

I want a lot of things. In the left hand corner there's a little self portrait in a flower petal boat. Underneath it along the whole bottom of the piece it says, "As if aesthetics..."

were a boat

we could float the whole thing on...

towing back what we gave away too easily."

There are also, in case that's all too obscure, some editorial bugs.

Google art project

2011-05-23T19:05:00.000-04:00

I have another piece to post and another one under way, but I'm not sure when I'll get them blogged. (Can that be a word? Let's say yes.) I'm very busy lately, but I miss writing and I hope to get back to it this summer. I have visions of blog posts about amazing exhibits I will see in New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore...But in the meantime, here's some amazing stuff I've seen online. Think of this as the art blogger's version of that new couch to 5K training app... this is the art I can see from my couch. Someday I will blog from Paris.

On Saturday one of my figure drawing buddies told me that google has been going to museums and photographing everything in sight in extremely high resolution. It's set up like google street view, he said, so you can take a virtual walk around the Hermitage without going to Moscow. It's an amazing concept, and it sounds even more incredible if you watch the guy who came up with the idea talk about it on the TED talks site. You can watch the talk online or just go straight to googleartproject.com. I've just started exploring the site and although it's not the virtual paradise I thought it would be, it is some kind of virtual paradise. The problem is that it's someone else's virtual paradise. It's an enormous undertaking, and there are a huge number of really weird curatorial choices being made as the google art project people try to decide what to focus on, so what you get is a very quirky selection of masterpieces from amazing museums.

The street view thing is also pretty funny. I'm starting to really love the unintentional effects of the enthusiasm for 360 degree views of spaces. When I was little I thought the real point of those driving games was to try to take an off road shortcut, and now that I'm older I feel the same way about 360 degree gallery views. I love that we can zoom in to the ceilings of galleries now. In the google art project's MOMA site there are some really odd effects when you try to get out of the rooms they've finished in to the ones they're not done with. In one of them you see a painting that's been blurred out next to a security guard whose head has been blurred out. It's kind of awesome, in a "this is so postmodern someone will surely make this an art project but actually it's only interesting for about three minutes" kind of way...

I've been looking at the Tate's site, though in the interest of efficiency I'm crabbily ignoring the whole walkthough aspect and just pulling down though the menu of available images. I'm finding some really amazing stuff. I'm loving the Tudor portraiture ( Who knew? Everyone but me?) and Ford Maddox Ford's Take Your Son, Sir kills me every time. I also love The Cholmondeley Ladies although there's really nothing intelligent to say about that piece that is as succinct and to the point as the elegant brevity of "WTF?!?!" If you don't feel that way just looking at the piece, read the viewing notes to the right of the image...

There's also a really great example of what the technology can do in the Chris Ofili piece called No Woman No Cry on the Tate's site. I like Chris Ofili, but this piece as always looked pretty idiotic to me. Of course I've only seen it in reproduction, and it turns out that a piece like this is just what you need google art project for. It looks like nothing until you zoom in really far, then try the option to view the paintings with the lights off. Not idiotic. Genius. Who knew? The Tate. Now who knows? The internet. Good going google.

Doubt, part 2

2011-01-28T12:42:00.002-05:00

In the last post I mentioned that I made two pieces based on the same piece: they also have the same title: Doubt. This one is an etching that I made at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop with the help of my mom, Margie Simpson, and her lovely partner Tom Drucker.

Here's a detail:

I'm quite happy with this piece, and I'm excited to get to work on a new print. Jim Stroud at Center Street Studios has offered to work with me on another etching- I feel very lucky to have such a plethora of fantastic printmakers around me, especially because I have yet to meet a group of artists I like more.

It's my theory that printmakers are generally down to earth, funny and well socialized because they work in groups in the most insanely humbling medium on earth. It takes a sterling character to work in a process where your weeks worth of work can disappear because you lost track of time. Printmaking is good for the character. Painting, or drawing however- sitting in a room alone for long periods of time doing something that could but probably won't pay off really well...Perhaps we painters and draw-ers should be congratulated if we restrain our megalomania and paranoia for 90 minute stretches at a time...Or we should do printmaking on a regular basis, as a medicinal gesture akin to getting 15 minutes of sun exposure per day.

Doubt, part 1

2011-01-27T17:25:00.002-05:00

I just finished a couple new pieces based on the same idea. I started a drawing, then went to Austin and made an an etching based on the idea I'd started, then I came home and finished the drawing. I really love the etching and will post images of that soon, but in the meantime here's the drawing. I've posted small images here but larger details are on the website.

It's a real mix of drawing and painting, as you can see in these details. I've taken to taking a paintbrush to the ink that's in my pens every now and then, as well as drawing on top of watercolors like I always do.

The text above says, "However comforting, faith is a far more lethal sword than" followed by a little arrow that points to the central word doubt. There's also a naked dad figure on the left edge of the drawing that you can probably see better in the big images on the website.

That text is right above this image.

I've painted lemmings before, but I realized as I was drawing these that I somehow picked up the idea that lemmings were pretty much the same as guinea pigs with tails. I looked them up this time, after I'd drawn them, and it turns out I'm pretty much right.

Whenever I use lemmings I think about the horrible story of lemmings and the turntable. I'm not sure everyone knows this story, but I never mean them as a simple symbol of mass suicide because of the story. If you don't know, here's the deal, copied from Wikipedia.

The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors...[among the most] influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.

Insane! Turns out that White Wilderness won an academy award, too!

I love stories of fake things that become myths. I like Arthur Evans and Knossos and the Snake Goddess at the Boston MFA and Robert Graves and the fact that people invented the cyclops because of mammoth skeletons.

But back to Doubt. Here's the last detail.

The text says, "I know so little but this."

Reminder and The Terrifying Minute...

2010-11-28T21:23:00.003-05:00

You know the cartoon where Charlie Brown is fighting with the lawn chair? I've been stuck in that scene, only in slow motion, only with cameras. Just imagine a bunch of cameras, all slightly but irrevocably broken or with missing battery chargers or connectors or memory cards, slowly attacking me over the course of a couple weeks. Every time I try to photogrpah my work I am utterly, maddeningly set upon by technical problems. It's exactly like that cartoon.

Today, though, I finally managed to get some decent images of my new work.

The most recent piece is called Reminder, and you can see it on the website here. I'm using watercolors with my pens now, and I'm loving how it's working out. These are special archival watercolors that are based upon the colors that were used in ancient Japanese prints- they're very vivid and beautiful, and I can't wait to work with them some more.

Here are a few details:

It's a somewhat complicated piece, and it's better if you can read all the tiny text, which you can do by looking at the details on the website.

It's not nearly as complicated as this piece, though. This one is called

The Terrifying Minute, or How to Tell the Story.

You can see it on the website here, and it's based on several Victorian games that I saw in the Free Library of Philadelphia's wonderful rare books collection. Here's the whole piece:

The overlapping circles at the center of the piece are numbered, and if you follow the numbers around from the outside of the circles spiraling in towards the center you can see the progression of a life, with a character being born at 1 and going on from there to 24. It's not a progression that goes strictly by numerical age- the person I drew is quite a bit older than 24 at the end of the path through the circles.

There's also an overarching structure*: each circle represents a theme or idea that is countered by the circle opposite. There are love and hate circles, for instance. Each segment that falls in a particular circle responds to each theme- so where the hate circle, for instance, crosses the privilege circle, you get something that makes sense with those two ideas and that still follows the narrative of the life story that's being told. I've laid out the details on the website so that if anyone is interested they can get a reasonable sense of going around the circle here, but it's pretty hard to get on the web...

The whole piece is laid out as if it's a game that you can play.

These are the characters you can choose:

And there are choices to make:

* I almost wrote "metastructure". At what age does it become impossible to use words like metastructure with a straight face?

Disreputable Miracles, Our Carnal Eyes, Issues and a Statement...

2010-07-05T19:20:00.003-04:00

This is a jam packed blog post! I recently finished a couple new pieces, and there are enlargements and details on the website. The image above is Disreputable Miracles, and it's made with markers rather than ballpoint pen, as is the one below, which is called Our Carnal Eyes".

I had occasion to rewrite my artists' statement recently, and it posed an interesting problem for me. I found it difficult to write text about text, and it was particularly weird because several of my new pieces can be read as artists' statements in and of themselves. These last few pieces have been very much about the way I'm thinking about aesthetics and culture. I addressed that aspect of my work when I wrote, and for once my artists' statement doesn't make me cringe when I read it. So if you're interested, here it is, with handy hypertext links to my images because I'm technical like that.

I think of my work as a way of enshrining time spent in doubt. I draw rather than write, and write rather than communicate exclusively through images, because for me the combination is the best way to speak clearly about things I'm not at all clear about. I often make statements that are contradicted by words in the details, or write words in fonts or near images that undermine the meaning of what I'm saying. If I present a self in my work, it's a fractured, contingent self. The sense of breakage is not so much about violence as it is about splitting in the way that a playwright might split himself into several voices or characters to explore an idea. Some of my ideas are best said by cockroaches, or written in bubble letters backwards next to pictures of babies. Words like maybe, possibly and hopefully occur over and over. I'm interested in the contradiction between the amount of time I put in to each piece and the amount of doubt it embodies. I like putting a lot of artistic muscle behind subjective, fluctuating, unresolved ideas.

Several of my recent pieces revolve around questions I have about the relationship between high art and mass culture. Efficacy reads*, "If the value (read: emotional viability) of an image is adversely affected by the frequency of its use, what are we left with?" I come back to this question a lot. I love the art world because it creates a cultural space that values individuality, but I worry that in the process of doing so we've defined ourselves in opposition to mass culture so persistently that it's become easy to dismiss imagery, subject matter and ideas that address universal experiences simply because they are common. I'm interested in pinpointing the time in my artistic development when I realized I shouldn't paint a sunset, or a swan, or anything too girly. (Matthew Barney climbs the levels of the Guggenheim in one of the Cremaster movies- girl art, entertaining and pleasing, is right at the bottom level. He ascends to Robert Smithson.)

I sometimes think that visual pleasure itself has become suspect as subject matter unless it's radically decontextualized, laughed at, or forced into a context that severs its ties to the world around us. I think there's a funny puritan strain in some thinking about art, in which the highest aesthetic experience is the one that is the least embodied. It's as if beauty, because it's been used in advertising, has lost all claims to our attention, except when it can take on a cerebral, nun-like aspect that disavows all connection to the corporeal world, or when it's so debased that it can seem ironic. One of the things I doubt a lot is the idea that using art to entertain, seduce or connect is silly regardless of the context.

I care very much that my work is accessible. One of my students, a working class urban kid, got a summer scholarship to art school. He was impressed with the upper middle class students' drawing ability, but asked with great bitterness, "Why are they so dirty? Don't they ever take a bath?" I tried lamely to explain that they were dirty in a well intentioned attempt to reject their privilege, but I didn't convince anyone. I think about this exchange every time I get asked to talk about my work. It struck me that making work that rejects beauty is the visual art equivalent of not taking a bath. I want my work to look difficult, to be readable, to be pretty and funny and cute and decorative- all the disreputable, supposedly lightweight artistic categories that function to give people who don't know much about art entrance into the work- without sacrificing complexity.

A recent piece, Trade shows a woman figure with text that reads*, "Will (NOT. Hopefully. Maybe.) Trade Beauty for (a secretive and obnoxious system of) Taxonomy." Banners below read, "Our Loves (Eyes) Do Not Betray Us." I'm trying to marry my own primal aesthetic experiences: sunsets, swans, flowers, birds, etc; to primary emotional realities: motherhood, mortality, the natural world, our relationships to ourselves and each other. Trade says, in bubble letters, "The power of that first flower or sunset may fade, but must we throw the ocean out with the bathwater? We seek blossoms as a pure ideation of pink, frightened of pollen and obsessed by bees."

*When I quote my own work I put words that are in small text, or otherwise inserted in a marginal way in to a larger statement in to parentheses.

Also, I just posted images of this piece I did last summer, which is done in ball point pen. It's called Issues.

Rob Matthews, Master of T/S/Ps

2010-06-16T22:22:00.004-04:00

I rarely have time to blog these days, but I had to write a short post about Rob Matthew's beautiful show at Gallery Joe. I love his work. Go see it! It's only up until June 26th, and if you haven't seen a tree (or a snake, or a person) drawn by Rob Matthews, you haven't seen a tree (or a snake, or a person.)

The show is called "It Fills Us. We Arrange It." and details are here.

The show also includes another killer skull that I don't have an image of: he's made some beautiful white washy drawings on black paper that seem to float off the page. What a freaking genius.

Trade

2010-04-15T22:22:00.003-04:00

I'm excited about where my work is going these days. This is a large new drawing called Trade. It's on my website here.

Here are some details. The color in these images is pretty dramatically off, but it's the best I can get right now. The morning glories, below, are actually purple, and the pinks in the clouds on the right are far less salmony in person.

The main text says "Will Not (maybe, possibly, hopefully) Trade...

...Beauty

For (a secretive and obnoxious system of) Taxonomy."

On the bottom banner it says "Our (Eyes) Loves..."

Do Not Betray Us."

The text in this bubble says "The power of that first sunset or flower may fade, but must we throw the ocean out with the bathwater? We seek blossoms as a pure ide(ot)ation of pink, frightened of pollen and obsessed by bees..."

The planet in the top right says "A Vast and Paranoid Universe of Theories about Art", and the lower one says "Prestige Eats Independent Thought For Dinner."

Landing soon

2010-02-03T23:45:00.005-05:00

I can't believe that the last time I wrote was in November- but then again, yes I can. I've been on two continents and in three states since then, and although I've got two more big drawings and one small one that are almost finished, there's no way I'm going to be able to work on them until February 16th. On that blessed day I will have finished moving my apartment and my studio in to a new, totally beautiful, enormous live-work space that I'm renting at a ridiculously low price from my fabulously generous landlord friend, who is also a terrific artist. (Who I'd name if I felt like having my home address on the internet...) I'm super lucky, and very grateful.

We arrived in Philadelphia in December and then spent most of the next month visiting relatives in Virginia and Austin. My mother, Margaret Simpson, and her partner Thom Drucker, run Slugfest Printmaking Workshop and Gallery, which is a fantastic place. They helped me finish up a print that I've been working on down there, and when I got back I signed off on another print that I made with Jim Stroud from Center Street Studios. That print, A Promise is a Promise, was sold to the Cornell University Museum of Art, and is included in Gallery Joe's next exhibition, which opens this Friday from 6-9. The show is up until February 27th. There are a lot of fabulous artists in the show- check it out: Astrid Bowlby, Emily Brown, Lynne Clibanoff, Christine Hiebert, Marilyn Holsing, Jeanne Jaffe, Mary Judge, Sharon Louden, Winifred Lutz, Rob Matthews, Linn Meyers, Kate Moran, Charles Ritchie, Stephen Robin, Mark Sheinkman, and Martin Wilner. I feel like lots of those names should have exclamation marks next to them.

When we got back to Philadelphia I started teaching again and began fixing up our new space. It's the classic artist's loft, which means that it has taken a fair amount of fixing up. Suffice it to say that no amount of lifting weights has ever managed to bring any semblance of a muscle to the surface of my sausagey arms, but painting my studio did it. The place is huge and wonderful, and once we are finally moved in, on February 16th, I'll get back to work.

Everyone's been asking me how it feels to be back in Philadelphia after being in Rome, and I have to admit that I was worried about the transition. I loved every day in Rome. I would move there in a second, if I could only learn to make Euros in some beautiful, efficient way. Say, out of spit, flour and food coloring. Since I can't, I had to come back- and when I was there, surrounded by fountains, Berninis and gelato, I thought Philadelphia would be a huge letdown- but it's not. I've always liked it here, and I still do. Philly's its own thing. It's a great, real, weird place. It's not pretty in February, but it's the perfect place to bunk in and make art.

And as for the transition, well, there's a lot to be said for being able to really speak a language. I did okay in Italian. I speak well enough that, with forethought, I can start a conversation or ask a question, and I have a pretty good accent. I can usually understand what people are saying, so it's not terrible, but for an Italian person talking to me is like making a cellphone call to the moon- communication can happen, but there's a ten minute pause before they get my reply. I LOVE that on this side of the ocean I can talk to strangers about whatever I want. On my second day in Philly I got in a forty-minute conversation with a crazy lady at the post office about her kids, her pets, her grandson's art, her grandson's feelings about his mom's slutty clothes, her daughter's dogs...It was fantastic.

And also? Philagraphika. Which more than enough of a reason to love being in Philadelphia right now. More on that later, you betcha, but in the meantime, in case it seems like I'm gratuitously promoting my mother's printmaking studio because she's, you know, my mommy, you could compare their gallery page to the Philagraphika artists page. Slugfest has shown half the people in Philagraphika. Which is another reason that Philagraphika rules. As does Slugfest. As does my mom.

True Story

2009-11-08T18:11:00.003-05:00

I just finished this piece tonight. I'm still not sure how I feel about this one, but I'm excited because I think that the next piece I do will be really nice- I'm figuring out lots of technical things about how to work with these new materials. I'm using magic markers in addition to my usual ballpoint pens, and I love them to death.

This one is called True Story.

The little text on the left says "All our nonsense aside, one never quite expects to feel this way." Then below that there's a cockroach saying, "Much less talk about it." Below that there's another bug saying "Much less make art about it."

Right above the dove heads there is a pair of ants: one is saying, "To preserve appearances" and the other is saying "We keep mum about feelings. (Dumb.)"

The rest you can read for yourself.

Or maybe not. The tiny text says, in pink, "Must we stick to" and then in black, "deep words about superficial things and superficial words about deep things."

One of my teachers in grad school was the incredibly charismatic poet and art critic Bill Berkson. I remember distinctly that he once said that there were two kinds of people- those who were interested in people and those who were interested in things. The latter was preferable- the distinction was framed in terms of being interested in art or being interested in gossip. I tried hard to give the impression that I was interested in things because I was totally fascinated by Bill Berkson. (As had been, it was rumored, Bianca Jagger, so I was in good company.) In any case, his offhand remark has not aged nearly as well as he had, and this piece is, among other things, my rebuttal, twenty years later. (Although I won't love him forever- that part is about the baby bird.)

You can see bigger images here.

Reading the birds

2009-10-30T18:38:00.007-04:00

Thom has been trying to get me to go to the Quirinale hill near our house to see the birds swarming at sunset, but so far he's failed because I'm always working in the studio too late, trying to grab the last of the good light. But tonight he dragged me outside to the river, and just looking down the Tiber towards the hill was incredible. The starlings here are skywriters, and they give new meaning to the old stuff about reading the flights of birds. If birds write like this in the sky every night, what kind of moron would NOT think it meant something?

Tomorrow's mission is to get to the Quirinale hill at the right time. Thom says the birds are so dense there that they block the view to St. Peters as if they're weather.

I'm also going to some more incredible churches tomorrow. I've pretty given up on posting about all the churches I visit because a) taking pictures in churches is problematic: it's usually forbidden and when you are allowed it's often way too dark to get anything good and b) there is already plenty of information about the churches of Rome online. Also c) half the time I go to a church I think I need to go back again. Sometimes I go when there's a mass, or it's the wrong time of day or I need to get better pictures or see some part of it that's closed or something. I've tried 4 times to get in to San Franceso di Sapienza, and by gum, I will. Because this is the outside!

No big whoop, you might think. But I protest: whoop. Look closely at the tower.

This (below) is another one of the churches I need to go back to, St. Carlo alle Quatro Fontane, by Boromini. Boromini was supposed to be buried there, but he killed himself and so the plan was cancelled: in the bottom of the church there's a wonderful staircase that he designed leading down to a very sad empty crypt.

It's beeee-utiful inside, too: here's the view looking up at the dome.

I have to go back there for sure because I need more pictures: there are the apartments of a saint upstairs; you pay a euro to a woman who is clearly auditioning for the part of Dracula's housekeeper and she leads you up some stairs to one of the oddest little apartment complexes you have ever seen. Or will see, when I go back there with my camera.

This is Santa Prassede, a gorgeous church with an incredible byzantine mosaic chapel that is totally impossible to photograph, I discovered. Even the internet cannot provide me with a good enough picture of it. I did manage to take video inside the chapel, which is probably better than nothing: it was dedicated to Theodora, the mother of the pope who built the church.

Have I mentioned how much I love Rome in the last five minutes? No? Well, I love it. This graffiti was in the metro station on my way to work.

Rumor

2009-10-21T18:12:00.003-04:00

I finished a piece I've been working on for ages yesterday. It's called Rumor, and it's on my website here if you want to see bigger pictures.

I'm working with magic markers and ballpoint pens, and there are many, many layers of both on this piece. This is my first large drawing in color, with these pens, and I'm still not sure about it. Sometimes I think it's really great, and other times I just keep repeating the same joke in my head: this piece puts the mental in experimental.

I love working with the magic markers, though. I've got another magic marker piece started already, and someday soon I'll finish the other black and white ballpoint piece that I worked on in August. It's another swan, and it's looking pretty good, but I've been seduced by these new pens- I just can't go back to black and white right now.

This piece took me about two months, working in the studio nearly every day. Someday I'll make a little video out of all the phases it went through- I changed all these colors about a million times before I settled on anything- the green area outside the word innocence was pink, then purplish, then blue, then green.

The large text says, "There was a rumor of innocence and guilt."

Speaking of feeling guilty, I know that I said that I was going to post about a fabulous church in Rome every day until I leave, and I didn't do that today, but I am actually not feeling the least bit guilty about it. Visiting a church a day I can do. I visited two churches today. Posting every day? No.

Do not Discuss Religion with Geese: Il Gesu Part 1

2009-10-20T16:43:00.004-04:00

Goosey goosey gander, where do you wander?
Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man who would not say his prayers
So I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.

I'm pretty sure that this nursery rhyme refers to the time when the queen of England was suspected of being a secret Catholic. The old man in question was, according to me, her priest, because at that time not saying your prayers was a punishable offense, although not by goose: for a while there one had to prove loyalty to the Church of England by saying the correct prayers. I'm hazy on the dates and names, but I'm pretty sure the goose was a Protestant. A mean Protestant.

If the goose had been a Jesuit, though, he might have liked today's church: Il Gesu. Il Gesu is the famous mothership of the Jesuits. I don't know a Jesuit from a hole in the ground, but I do know that this kind of iconography does NOT generally grace the front of your sweetness and light variety chapel.

There is a lot of that in Il Gesu. There are two priests stomping on people flanking the entranceway and at least two more groups of people being stompled inside the church. Even the cherubs don't look too friendly.

I'm going to have to go back there, though, because there was a gorgeous little chapel with a 15th century Madonna and the ceiling looked amazing, I made a big mistake by going in the early evening. I forgot that churches built in 1568 might not have the greatest light fixtures. So most of what I wanted to look at, particularly on the ceiling, was hidden in darkness. And although I was very tricky and figured out that I could lay my camera down flat on a chair to get a picture, I had technical problems.

Ooops. Part 2 soon.

Basilica of San Clemente

2009-10-19T16:37:00.008-04:00

I've only got about seven more weeks left in Rome, and there are still hundreds of amazing things I want to do. This city is so dense with history that talking about what I've already seen seems a little nuts: I've been to the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, the Appian Way, St.Peters, the Sistine Chapel and the Pantheon. I've seen Berninis at the Piazza Navona and the Villa Borghese and I've visited the amazing Villa Dora Pamphilj. Each one of these places has blown my mind. The urban legend about doing acid seven times flutters around in my brain: if each of these sights was the most head-explodingly wonderful thing I've ever seen, am I legally insane?

I've eaten countless gelatos and discovered exactly why everyone who goes to Italy comes back to the US as a coffee snob. I've also developed a passionate devotion to bread sticks, a tertiary food obsession that is going to be really hard to explain an ocean away from my favorite brand. I've met lots of strangers and had actual conversations in actual Italian. My work has taken a really insane turn that I'm almost ready to let out of the closet. Seven more weeks is not long enough- I'm totally in love with Rome- but I will be very happy to see my family and friends again. I'm ready to return.

Almost. First I have to see seven weeks worth of churches. I'm on the church-a-day plan. Here's the deal. Churches in Rome are free museums. The only price of admission is a cynical pretense of modesty: if you're a woman, you have to cover up your sinful bare arms and neck to enter. (This irritated me much more before I saw a nun chewing out a shirtless college boy. I like my idiocy gender-neutral.)

I carry around a one euro scarf for just this purpose, and every day I make a point of going in to see a new church. I am rarely disappointed or bored. I've happened upon some incredible scenes: Rome is a place where you can find accidental Caravaggios, or Poussin's coffin, or columns so twisty they seem not to make sense, much less stand upright, just by walking in to an inconspicuous door on a side street. (It's surprising how inconspicuous the doors often are, but the history of Christianity in Rome is such that for a good long time it was practical to have the outsides of the churches deflect, rather than attract attention.)

I'm not going to try to catch up by documenting the amazing places I've already been, but I'm going to do my best to document the church-a-day mission from here on out.

Today I visited the Basilica of San Clemente, which is near my house, down the street from the Coloseum. (See? Rome=crazy town.)

San Clemente's Mithraeum

I had originally planned to organize my visits to churches around the idea of hunting for Mithras. Mithraems are little cave-like spaces in which an astrologically based mystery cult of Mithras was practiced: it's very interesting. Mithras is almost always pictured with a bull, a dog, a scorpion and a snake, which are thought to be references to constellations, and Mithras is always shown letting the blood of the bull. And he has a nice hat.

San Clemente's Mithraem is three stories down, below the 12th century church and the 4th century church below that. It's an amazing place to visit because all three levels of church are relatively intact: I'm used to being told that such-and-such a church was on top of something else, but in San Clemente's case you go downstairs, and there's the older church: you can see where you would have sat. And below that, the temple of Mithras. You can read about Mithras by following either of the links on his name, but not much is known about Mithraism: it was a mystery cult- only the initiates knew what it was about. Kinda like the Masons...(insert conspiracy theory here.)

There are lots of Mithraems in Rome, but Mithras hangs out in dark basements, and the Basillica of San Clemente convinced me that what I love is mostly above ground. Like this:

These mosaics were so beautiful! The sheep were gorgeous, touching, knowing little creatures.

Those are acanthus leaves. If you tell me what the deal is with acanthus I will buy you a gelato.

And if those mosaics weren't enough, there was the Chapel of St. Catherine of Alexandra by Masolino.

There are no good pictures of this anywhere on the internet. The church is full of signs saying that photography is forbidden, but it's such a shame- this little chapel was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, and the reproductions that were sold at the little church store stink. They show single scenes from a complex multi-perspectival tapestry of geometry that fills the chapel. This blurry one is the best I can find that gives a sense of the color and the way the place is put together. It's wonderful, and it's rotten that one can't photograph it, at least without a flash. Although to their credit, the Irish monks who run San Clemente have put the chapel up on the web in a nice VR format. Check it out!

This little scene is Saint Catherine being rescued from torture by an angel- the wheels were supposed to be tearing her apart, but they failed to do so. One thing I'm learning in my church-a-day mission is that saints were often the victim of severely inefficient murder attempts. One of my books says that St. Cecilia was sentenced to death by suffocation in the steam of her own bathroom. When that failed, someone tried to chop her head off three times. And failed. Saint Catherine of Alexandra is shown here escaping these wheels through divine intercession, but another source says that the wheel broke when she touched it.

Here she is converting the philosophers of Alexandria.

This annunciation is above the door to the chapel. It's gorgeous. You can see better pictures on the Basilica San Clemente Web Site.

Vindicating the Typewriter

2009-09-29T15:40:00.009-04:00

I'm living in Rome now, not too far away from this thing, the monument to Victorio Emmanuel II. It was designed by Guiseppe Sacconi and although it was started in 1911, it wasn't finished until 1935, and which point Sacconi, thank God, was dead. Sacconi might have been aware of the controversy about the site of the monument- it was built over medieval remains, displaced a bunch of people and cut into the hill in an ugly way- but my hope is that he died before the monument itself became a legend. Because while all that sucked, it sucked in 1935. Mussolini made speeches on it in the following decade, but that's not what anyone's talking about, and even that was 64 years ago. And nobody's moving on.

Every text about this monument says some version of the same thing. From Wikipedia:

The monument itself is often regarded as pompous and too large. It is clearly visible to most of the city of Rome despite being boxy in general shape and lacking a dome or a tower. The monument is also glaringly white, making it highly conspicuous amidst the generally brownish buildings surrounding it, and its stacked, crowded nature has lent it several derogatory nicknames. Romans sometimes refer to the structure by a variety of irreverent slang expressions, such as "Zuppa Inglese", "the wedding cake", and "the false teeth", while Americans liberating Rome in 1944 labeled it "the typewriter", a nickname also adopted by the locals.

My Blue Guide to Rome can't get enough of how hideous this monument is, and neither can the Eyewitness guide. Lonely Planet even gets in on the action. Rick Steeves, Mr. Nice, says," From its roof you see everything in town, except this pompous, oversized monument — nicknamed "the typewriter" and "the wedding cake."

I've yet to find my eyeballs bursting in to flame when I see it. I pass it on the way to and from work, and today I took the trouble to climb it. I was looking for the ugly.

I didn't find it. I left the monument as mystified as I was when I got there. There are beautiful views from the top. There are some goofy sculptures, but there are good ones too. It's not ugly.

One of my students pointed out that it's gaudy, but lots of things in Rome are gaudy. Such as this:

St.Peters is also big, white, ornate and morally dubious. And Pope Ratzinger makes speeches in it. Ratzinger, whatever else he may be, is a walking incitement to nickname.

The whole thing reminds me of the way that when I was in high school there seemed to be collective decisions made about people's attractiveness that had little do with how people actually looked. One of the most beautiful women I've ever known was considered ugly in my high school, and another fairly plain girl had dates lining up around the block. She was nice, but this was a long line, and these were not deep sweet boys looking into the depths of her soul. It was just that agreements had been made. Nancy was pretty. Rebecca was not. You didn't need to use your actual eyes if you knew that by professing affection for Nancy you were not going to have to argue your point.There was a certain cowardice about it, but it wasn't malicious: liking Nancy, as hating the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II, was a symbolic nod to the collective. It was a bow to public opinion and ease. Plus Nancy was nice.

But calling Vittorio Emmanuel II's monument ugly is really reaching. This is ugly.

There is a lot of ugly. But there's not that much ugly that has a nickname, or that is made of sparkly clean marble and offers stunning views of a city.

The gaudy to ugly connection strikes me as the heart of the matter. There's a smugness inherent in the word gaudy. Gaudy is trying too hard, unrestrained, unsophisticated, over the top. It's wearing all its accessories at once, flashing at you with open need, appealing to everyone indisciminately. It's the opposite of minimal. It's not modern. It's not sophisticated. It's out there, wanting you to like it.

And what's wrong with that? We're not talking about people, we're talking about architecture. Shouldn't architecture try as hard as it can? Shouldn't it give you as many reasons as possible to like it, and to relate to it on a human scale? Shouldn't it flash its ornamentation at everyone?

Another of my favorite buildings, the Philadelphia city hall, is also nicknamed the wedding cake. (Apparently we don't like our architecture with icing.)

Both buildings are full of allegorical statues; The monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II has statues personifying the cities of Italy on it, and Philly's city hall is a cake full of Industry, Patience and Honor. We don't think that way any more, but it might be helpful to do so in this case. Imagine the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuel as a Gaudiness personfied. Imagine that as a statue. Of someone gaudy. Dolly Parton? Imagine Gaudy's opposite. It's much harder to come up with a visual of that statue- who would it look like? Someone so minimal, so sophisticated, so absolutely not trying too hard that they personify restraint and culture...John Malkovitch?

Who would you rather have dinner with? Well, fine, but who would you rather have attend your sister's wedding? The one where all your rotten cousins show up and get obnoxious, and your dad drinks too much champagne and your mom sings that awful song for the five hundredth time...The personification of minimalism is really great for impressing a small party of sophisticates, but you've got to go with Gaudy for good manners and pleasing a crowd. And doesn't civic architecture, which is, after all, about public space, have an obligation to try to be pleasing?

I'm not suggesting that we should return to the Baroque or that minimalism is bad. I love me some great minimalist architecture. But let's stop trying to impress John Malkovitch by dissing the monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II. It only wants us to love it. And we might as well.

Genius Jen

2009-09-19T14:48:00.003-04:00

My pal Jen MacDonald just uploaded some of her beautiful videos to youtube. This one is called Romantic Brood.

You can see more of them here ; they're all great, but you might have to be persistent to see them all. Youtube gave me a little trouble; it kept telling me to try again later. But it wasn't very specific about exactly when later was... Reloading the page seemed to fool it into thinking I'd given it a long, rejuvinating rest. Just keep trying that if it conks out after the first video.

Rome baby!

2009-08-31T16:16:00.002-04:00

I'm in Rome now, and every day I see more amazing art than I can possibly write about. I have thousands of pictures and tons of great stories and I'm completely in love with about a million things a day. Today? A fragment of a giant foot that was on the grass near a restoration in progress that's taking place off of the Appian Way. There's another giant foot fragment in Rome that's on Via dei Piedi or something- this is not that foot. That's good too, but that's a human foot. This one was about three feet wide and well, see for yourself.

I'm working on a new large drawing and have done a few small ones, but those will be posted later. For now, though, some random pictures of things I love in Rome. Not even close to a complete list.

Bernini's Bee Fountain

and his elephant. Pretty much everything Bernini is great, including his buffi baffi. This elephant is outside of the church called Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Which I also love, not least because its name translates as "St. Mary on top of Minerva." Because it is. The old temple to Minerva is underneath it somewhere.

Why fake what you already have? This is in that same church, and it's reeeeaaaalll....

These ladies are on the top of the National Museum of Modern Art.

And this guy, whose name I think is Mithrades, is in the Vatican.

Another fountain, this time outside the Villa Borghese, which you can look up if you want to understand this fine simile: as pigs are to mud, Sam is to Rome.

The Infant Asterios

2009-07-26T01:20:00.003-04:00

In the process of working on my big book project I made a very tiny book that I'm selling online at Quimby's for a whopping $7. Quimby's is a fabulous bookstore and they were nice enough to feature my book this week on their home page. If you want one you can get it here.

These images are pages from the book- I'm pretty sure that the cover image is larger than actual size.

Asterios is the name that Minos gave to the Minotaur when he was born. The minotaur, in case you're not up on your classical monsters, was the son of Minos and Pasiphae, a sorceress. Kind of. You can look it up. I would explain, but I'm going to Rome any minute now and unless I get about fifty things done in the next week I'm going to have to exchange my plane ticket for a one way ticket to crazy town.

Quimby's doesn't stock too many copies of the book, so if you want one and they're out I'd appreciate it if you'd comment and let me know. (These tiny minotaur books are in stores for a limited time only! Get yours today! )

Dinky Drawings (no Shrinky)

2009-06-11T20:03:00.003-04:00

Want to know how to say a funny moustache in Italian? You know you do: i buffi baffi. Now, please, use that in a sentence. Or as a personal mission statement. I don't care.

I'm getting ready to go teach in Rome for a semester, so I'm trying to learn Italian. I've also been making some tiny drawings while I'm printing pages for the artists' book I'm making. My printer is slow and my computer is small, so when I print, my computer hangs up for what seems like at least six hours. I print a lot, so I started working on little drawings in the down time. These are at Gallery Joe, and the one called "Sensitive" is going to be in their summer group show.

Bigger versions of these pieces are on my website on the drawings page.

My book project is coming along very well, if I do say so myself, and I've finally managed to make an etching that I really love! Gallery Joe set me up with James Stroud from Center Street Studio and he made me a fabulous tool that's letting me make tiny tiny marks- it's a sewing needle stuck in to a piece of wood, and it's genius. I just got back the first proof of my etching and it looks really great- I can't wait to get it finished.

In other news, I was a finalist for the Pew Fellowships in the Arts this year. Pretty cool! The artists who won this year are super geniusy, so I was in good company. Big ups, as my friend Carolyn would say, to Rob Matthews, Daniel Heyman, Anthony Campuzano and Nami Yamomoto! (Carolyn is very street because she's a pHD candidate at Penn.)

I must not blog! (I blog.)

2009-05-08T22:08:00.004-04:00

I'm still busy like a bee working on the big artists' book project and my etchings and I've also been doing a series of very small drawings that I'm excited about. I'm using colored magic markers in addition to the ballpoint pen and I'm loving it.

But I'm not going to post images of those yet. I'm bringing them to Gallery Joe first, and (first rule of bad blogging) I'm trying to avoid posting too much so that I can concentrate on getting more art made.

It should be easy to decide not to post to my blog, but being in the studio making a lot of work means, for me, listening to a lot of podcasts, which makes me want to blab about them. I've found some great ones.

The Philadelphia Free Library has a podcast of their author events, several of which are amazing, especially this one by Lynda Barry. I went to this event, and it was a hilarious, brilliant talk: I think everyone should listen to it. But I'm bossy that way.

Marilynne Robinson and Etgar Keret & Rivka Galchen were also good, but I would advise people to lay off the Salman Rushdie, Nanci Pelosi or Joyce Freaking Carol Oates. If you listen to hers don't say I didn't warn you.

Another great podcast that has taken me through hours of scratching at my etching plate with a tiny tiny needle is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I love this thing. It's great. I haven't heard a bad one of these yet.

I've also just found out that hulu.com has art21 episodes online Which means that even if you don't have the DVDs you can watch amazing artists talking about their work for free online. Go hulu!

Now it's back to the studio for me. Ciao!

2009-03-25T22:33:00.002-04:00

I finished a new piece a while ago. It's called Issues, and I'm afraid I don't have details posted yet- I'm having camera issues. Speaking of issues.

I hate pretty much everything about the whole "issues" euphemism. But I do have a certain sick admiration for the more creative variants of this kind of avoidance language. I have a friend who says things "activate her schema." I like to think that the blandification factor of pseudopsychological false-revelatory noncommunication activates my schema. But then again, so does cat hair.

You can see a larger image here.

2009-03-10T21:06:00.002-04:00

Okay, so it's been a hundred years since I last posted. I've been busy. I'm teaching, working on a book project, I finished a new piece and I've just agreed to work with Center Street Studio to make two new etchings, which is very exciting. And I just found out that I'm going to Rome in the fall, so I'm trying to learn Italian, find an apartment in Rome, etc, etc. It's all very exciting, but I am not sure that it's humanly possible to get everything done. I need super powers, and I know exactly what I want: I want the ability to make time speed up and slow down at will. I wouldn't use my power for the common good, either. I'd be Mundane Woman, and I'd just live a happy life full of long hours in the studio and very very short faculty meetings.

And I'd spend a lot of long slow hours in Grand Scale, the new print exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I've posted about it already, but man, it's great. It hurts my eyes. Every single thing in that room makes me want to lie on the floor and moan with art awe agony. There's no bad work. There are lots of masterpieces by people I've never even heard of. It's just spectacular. The curators, Shelley Langdale and Larry Silver, must just giggle themselves to sleep every night. It's amazing. Go see it.

The Philadelphia Museum has cleverly set up their website so no one can repost their images, but here's a picture of the catalog, which is pretty intensely drool-worthy in itself.

Also, genius artist Rachel Perry Welty, with whom I showed at Gallery Joe, is doing a very hilarious performance piece on Facebook tomorrow- she's going to update her status every 60 seconds. If you're on Facebook you can friend her or just sign up to attend the event "Rachel is..." to see.

A detail (see below.)

2009-01-27T21:06:00.001-05:00

It's a Woodcut like Godzilla is a Lizard.

2009-01-27T21:05:00.001-05:00

The Triumphal Arch of Maximillian I, 1515 at the wonderful Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's huge. It's by Durer and pals. It's incredible. It's got snakes, goats, battles and mysterious empty seascapes. I'm going to have to go sit and stare at it for a few hundred hours before it goes away. You should too. Try to contain your drool. It won't be easy.

If I Invited You to Wear Pink and Watch Me Ride a Horse on my Roof You'd Come, Right?

2009-01-18T16:58:00.002-05:00

Well, you would if I was Maharao Ram Singh II of Kota, who in 1851 invited all his courtiers to do exactly that. This painting shows the event, complete with telling details, like the empty windows of his magnificent palace. Everybody came. All the rooms in the palace are vacant except one in the very bottom left, which holds a caged tiger.

You can see the original and lots more amazing art in the new portrait exhibit The Privilege of Paint in the Indian Art room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Gloria Swanson Leaf

2009-01-17T21:34:00.003-05:00

I'm testing a new system of blogging on the go that only lets me post one image at a time- but this is a good one.

It is, as I said, an image of Gloria Swanson carved in to a leaf. I saw it at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, which had a wonderful drawing show up while I was there. This leaf was part of their amazing permanent collection, which includes all kinds of manuscripts and writerly ephemera, such as the ratty old sock that was included in the collection of (I think) Somerset Maugham.

I was in Austin making some prints with the wonderful artists at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop. (They're great. And just because I'm related to them doesn't mean it's not true.) I loved making etchings, but now that I'm back I'm hard at work on a new drawing and a long term project I've been working on- an artists book. I'll post images of the prints and the new drawing when I have them, but expect lots of single-image posts till then.

We're HUGE in Paris.

2008-12-22T20:37:00.002-05:00

Rob Matthews and I are international art stars! We're huge in Paris! Or maybe we're really small in Paris. Or medium sized. In any case, we're in Paris. We're both in an exhibition called La Main qui Dessinait Toute Seule at the wonderful Gallerie Magda Danysz, and you can see images of our work on a Frenchifried website here, if you want proof. I mean besides the whole speaking with a fake french accent and wearing a lot of scarves thing.

Rule #1: Do not drool on the game board.

2008-11-28T10:28:00.003-05:00

Forget reading my blog. Go read BibliOdessey's post on old board games. It's so beautiful.

Check out these images, stolen from their post. Ohhh la la.

Information and larger images and more incredible board game images are over on BibliOdessey's post. Go there right now. Did I say oooh?

Structure

2008-11-12T22:15:00.004-05:00

I just put a new piece on the website: it's called Structure, and you can see larger images here.

I put lots of details on the site, so it should be pretty easy to read most of the text in the piece by clicking through the images if you're so inclined. Here is my favorite detail.

It says, "Are you a repeatable result?"

In this one The moth (a tobacco budworm moth, of course), says, "Let me tell you about my childhood."

I recently had a meeting with Nina Katchadourian, who is a fabulous artist and also a curator at the drawing center. She asked me about the way I used morning glories as symbols. I answered a little vaguely- morning glories are a complicated for me. But tobacco budworms are not. Those guys are artists.

Dance, baby, dance!

2008-11-07T22:46:00.003-05:00

That video of everybody at city hall made me realize that I have to learn the electric slide. If you don't know how to do it either, you can watch this video and groove. The lady with the cane is my favorite.

I love dance videos. I also found a really fun video that teaches the cha cha slide, which is probably familiar to middle schoolers worldwide but is new to me.

And then there's this guy. Who is so beautiful. The way he can't move, but yet does, so gracefully.

I found him because I was searching for that other elusive wedding dance, the Alley Cat. I can find a country western Alley Cat, but I want the one with the cat paws that Thom's relatives all do at weddings. The only hint of it on youtube is here, in this strangely beautiful grey video of some event, somewhere, at some Knights of Columbus Hall.

Of course that just made me want to Polka.

And these guys, who are so cute, do not do it the way I want it done.

Okay, I love you again Philly.

2008-11-07T15:49:00.003-05:00

Max Lawrence, who is a fabulous artist by the way, had the presence of mind to go to city hall on election night, where he got videos of people doing the electric slide and making the world's longest conga line around the block. Me, I just wobbled drunkenly down the street and yelped out the door a few times.

More here, here, and here.

I can't believe it!

2008-11-05T00:47:00.003-05:00

From the Nouvelle Observator, a poll:

Barack Obama élu président des Etats-Unis

c'est historique

c'est incroyable

c'est fantastique

Nombre de votants : 502

Votez !

If you don't have a note from your doctor, you are no longer allowed to be an artist.

2008-11-01T20:28:00.004-04:00

Peter Saul. Laylah Ali. Sue Coe. Enrique Chagoya. Jane Irish. Daniel Heyman. Art Spiegelman.

They were all at PAFA today. And about 30 people showed up.

Philly, I hate you.

Lynda Barry got a crappy audience here too. WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH US?!?!? I know there are many smart, funny, interesting artists in Philly! And Peter freaking SAUL is in town! WITH Spiegleman! And Laylah ALI! And although it may be permissible not to know who Enrique Chagoya is, since he's really huge on the west coast, he's a freaking genius, and DANG! Sue Coe! Everything she does is great! It was like international art genius day in Philly and nobody freaking showed! They all talked about their work and took questions and then hung around and chatted afterwards. Yup. HUNG AROUND AND CHATTED.

I got Peter Saul to autograph a catalog for friend and he drew a little self portrait in it! I lent Spiegleman and Sue Coe a pen! Laylah Ali admired my baby, who is also close personal friends with Spiegleman! This was all very cool, but it should not have been possible! These people should have been mobbed by fans! Where were the 1026 people? Don't they know Peter Saul is their god? Where were the 10 million grubby art students in the city? Where were the suckups? Where were the faculty from our three local art schools? Where was everyone under 50? ARGH!

WHY, when freaking Larry Gagosian was in town at Penn last year, did they have to open another room with a video silmulcast to accommodate all the people? If people know enough to go see Gagosian, who was depressing as HELL by the way, why aren't they smart enough to come see Peter Saul? And even if they're too prissy to like Peter Saul, they should be able to get behind Chagoya or Laylah Ali, who both make totally elegant work. NOBODY from my esteemed art school showed up, and that is lame. You know who was there? Charles Burns. And the artblog ladies. And Sarah McEneaney.

Why? Why? Why? Did someone poison the candy corns? Did the Pabst run dry in Pennsylvania, so everyone went to Maryland?

(If you're reading this and you're not in the art world, these people are about as good as we get. Peter Saul is like our Robert DiNiro or somebody. Maybe Redford. The rest of them are Hellen Mirren, Judy Densch, Paul Giamati, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Gagosian is like, oh, Michael Eisner.)

/rant

Enrique Chagoya (Sorry, I don't have a title.)

Remember, remember

2008-10-27T21:58:00.002-04:00

I'm almost done with a new big piece, but in the meantime, I've finished a small one.

You can see it larger here. I like this piece, but I'm fussing about the title. It's called Remember, remember and I want the title to make it clear that I'm talking to myself, not preaching to anyone else. I'm not sure that title does that, but nothing else is coming to mind. If you have any ideas for titles that DO make that clear, please let me know. Other than Hey Sam, Stop Wishing Your Laziness was Genius And Get to Work, I mean. I've already decided against that one.

Eat at Swallow

2008-10-24T19:50:00.004-04:00

I don't usually write about food, but I've been driven to it by my sense of justice. And some fries. They were really good fries.

Swallow is the best food and the best bargain in Philadelphia according to me and everyone I know who's gone there. And the reason I know this? People who go there go nuts telling other people to go. Before I went there I was accosted by my photographer friend, who described the food in so much detail it made me think he must be a secret food fetishist. But no. Eating there is such an experience that you get the virus: you start ranting to your loved ones and strangers alike. This place is GREAT. The food is incredibly delicious. The bill is small. The owner is a doll, and always, for some reason, gives us free food, even though all we do is go in there with our unruly baby and mess up the place and compliment the food. The waitstaff is swell- they put up with the undomesticated child with good humor and grace. Swallow is better and cheaper than Farmacia and Sovalo, which are two other very good restaurants in the old city area. It's WAY better than the Standard Tap, but that's because it's less high toned- the food is more frenchy and fancy than the Tap, but I mention it because it costs about the same amount to eat at Swallow as it does to eat at the tap. The chef's cooking is deceptively simple, precise and nuanced. See? I'm doing it. Go there. Get the beef bourguignon. You can thank me later.

The reason I'm writing about it here is that for some reason the place got assassinated by Craig LeBan in the Enquirer. My guess is that he thought he was being sucked up to and got his revenge: the chef does tend to come out of the kitchen to chat, and perhaps Mr. LeBan took it personally. But whatever. The man is wrong, and Swallow should not be suffering because of one cranky man.

Hold my hand, Guido, and teach me to sing

2008-10-23T00:02:00.001-04:00

While I was in the Philadelphia library looking at the Poe exhibit I found out that they are digitizing many of their holdings. They have their medieval manuscripts online and available through Columbia University's Digital Scriptorium. Which is pretty great. I had planned to write a post about the rare book collection at the Philadelphia Library, but this image from the Scriptorium hijacked me.

This is a "Guidonian hand with somatization symbols." Guidonian hands, in case you didn't know, diagram a medieval method of learning to site sing. You can read about them here, and there's a lovely short video of someone demonstrating their usefulness below.

But don't you just want to look at them? I love them.

The Granger Collection, NY

The Guido in question is Guido d'Arezzo, pictured here.

This is a parody of a Guidonian hand from this blog.

While I was looking at hand diagrams I came across a glove map of London.

It's from Bioephemera, which looks like a great blog, and from there I went to this wonderful collection of hand images that includes a really great grisly description of the medieval "hand of glory" that should creep you out just in time for Halloween.

Here are some more hand diagrams, just because they're awesome.

Po, po, po Poe.

2008-10-22T23:10:00.000-04:00

Manet's Raven

I went to the rare book collection at the Philadelphia Free Library yesterday to see the Edgar Allen Poe exhibit. It was really just an excuse to check in on Grip, my favorite raven, since I'm not that interested in Poe, but as usual when I find myself dismissing something other people like, once I gave Poe a chance I found him fascinating.

The Raven poem, for instance, gets stranger and stranger the more one thinks about it. The bust of Pallas? Lenore? What!? Imagine: "Okay. We've got this animal. Spooky. A squirrel, maybe, or a weasel. No, a bird. A big one. An ostritch. No, a raven. And it's all about the guy's lost love Betty. No, something unusual, we'll get that later. And the ostritch knows one word, but it's a really scary word..."

Tenniel's Raven

Dore's raven

Poe's obituary is on exhibit. It says, "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it" It's a long, extraordinarily brutal piece of writing. It was written by one Mr. Griswold, who, Wikepedia says, bore a grudge against Poe. Um, yeah.

Shortly before Poe died he went on a paranoid bender that made him shave his moustache to confuse would be assassins, disappear for a few weeks of hard drinking and reappear puffy faced and sick wearing someone else's clothes. He died ranting about someone named "Reynolds" in a hospital, attended by a relative he called his "bitterest enemy".

He also had the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen. It's very jaunty and girly. I'd love to have penmanship like Poe. The writing looks especially great in a love poem he sent to a married woman friend that he later tried to woo with a suicide attempt. (Word to the wise, Poe, when you write a two page love poem, the first page should contain something about the beloved object, not just 18 stanzas of how you can't wait to shed the mortal coil.) Although he also married his 13 year old cousin. That stuff probably works pretty well on preteens, especially with the handwriting.

But who am I to snark? He was also a genius, and since 1950 his grave has been visited by a "Poe toaster" who, in the early hours of January 19th, toasts with cognac and leaves three roses on his grave. (I should be so lucky. My grave will probably be visited intermittently by a lonely dachshund who will leave three different souvenirs on an occasional basis. )

Manet, Le Corbeau,1875

VVerk

2008-10-12T19:43:00.003-04:00

Thanks to a nice person who stumbled on my web site recently, I discovered VVork magazine, which has a nice little series of demonstration photos this month. This one is my favorite.

Budworm's Dilemma

2008-10-04T23:18:00.006-04:00

The hiatus is over. I went on blog hiatus because I was working on an artists book which I knew would take a while to finish. I didn't think I'd have time to post anything until the book was done, but now I'm back to making drawings. Why, you ask? Because a fabulous artist* invited me to participate in a show in Paris. Oui oui, mon frere, Pareee de France. It's at a really great gallery, Galerie Magda Danysz, I love the work they show, and have I mentioned that it's in Paris? I'm so excited.

I finished this new piece this week. It's called The Budworm's Dilemma, and it's up on the website here.

It has some slightly complicated word play. It says, "Depending on my level of optimism or pessimism, the chomping past or present devours my past or present." So if you read it down the left side of the page, it says, "Depending on my level of optimism, the chomping present devours my past," and if you read down the right side it says, "Depending on my level of pessimism the chomping past devours my present." But you can read it any way you want.

What you might not know, though, is why it's called The Budworm's Dilemma. You'd only be able to guess at that if you were as obsessive a gardener as I am, or rather, if you obsessively watch your garden the way I do. I can't really say I'm an obsessive gardener in any typical sense. My garden is pretty amazingly messy: it's totally overgrown and weed filled. But that's because I'm always really curious to see what each little sprout will turn in to. So half the time I end up watering the weeds and watching the bugs that are eating my flowers with great enthusiasm and excitement.

Which leads me to budworms. Tobacco budworms, plague of the south, do immeasurable damage to crops like, say, tobacco. But they also eat petunias, and they eat them in a really artistic pattern. They eat petunias in such a way that if you look quickly at a ravaged patch of petunias, you don't notice that your flowers have been damaged: they just look like another kind of flower. You also wouldn't notice, unless you looked closely, the budworm itself curled up in the center of the flower it's finished eating.

Petunias and budworms are in this new piece. You can see the progression of the petunia in this series of details. The moth in this image is the tobacco moth.

Next time you're looking at some petunias, take another look. This kind of damage is fairly common, and it's very beautiful. There are larger images of the piece and more details on the site here.

In other news, Jennifer Zarro interviewed me last month for Art Matters, which has the full interview in a great looking two page spread with images of Suspense and Suspension of Disbelief in the magazine this month. It looks great. I find it excruciating to read. But hey. I don't get paid the big bucks to talk about art. (Or at all. But you know what I mean.) The interview is online here.

*The fabulous artist who invited me to be in the show will remain unnamed for now- I think he might want to keep things on the down low until he's sure his friends won't beat him with sticks for not inviting them to be in a show in Paris.

A whole lotta dang.

2008-09-20T22:12:00.006-04:00

This great little animation was ruthlessly ripped off from The Fourth Samba. I couldn't help it. It was too delicious.

Also, Peter Saul is coming to PAFA! And they've also got a bunch of great events to go with the exhibition.Click the link to check out the lineup for their symposium: Laylah Ali, David Carrier, Enrique Chagoya, Sue Coe, Robert Cozzolino, Daniel Heyman, Patricia Hills, Jane Irish, Peter Saul, and Art Spiegelman. And they left Robert Storr and Peter Saul himself OFF THE LIST. DANG. Go PAFA.

Peter Saul, Self Portrait with Haircut

Peter Saul, The Neptunes

Hiatus, schmiatus.

2008-09-06T00:26:00.005-04:00

Okay, I guess this hiatus thing isn't working out. As soon as I declared hiatus I wanted to post all kinds of things.

Like, for instance, the work of Jon Rappleye. I went to see his work in New York this week. He's a freaking genius.

In the Tremble this Nature Abounds

Brutal Ardor

From Jeff Bailey Gallery.

These images are too small to see well, but click here to see a big image which still does not convey the amazingness of the work in person. He's a crazy draftsman and makes pieces that look like collage but aren't. They have a totally original visual language and an incredibly comprehensive range of scale: there are finely detailed parts and cartoony parts and flat color and greyscale...and it all works together. They have creepy birds and star-eyed owls and beautiful deer...They're amazing. I saw one a couple years ago at Vox Populi and then he was in New American Paintings and now he shows at Jeff Bailey and Richard Heller Gallery in LA. Jeff Bailey was kind enough to take a piece out so that I could look at his work in person when I went in to the gallery today, and I highly recommend the experience to anyone who's heading over to Chelsea.

When I was in New York I also saw the Turner show at the Met, which was a revelation, and Charles Burns' show at Adam Baumgold Gallery. It was terrific. The man's a genius, but I figure everyone already knows that by now. If you don't know that, go buy Black Hole right now. And while you're there, buy Maira Kallman's The Principles of Uncertainty. That book is the best thing I've read in a long time.

Bells.

2008-09-03T08:06:00.005-04:00

This video kills me. I love it.

I am so ready for this jelly

2008-08-14T04:16:00.004-04:00

I lied. There will be no posting of my own art for a while. But there will be posting of Festo's air jellyfish. Because how can there not be? From Engadget.

Hiatus!

2008-08-10T18:18:00.002-04:00

Monkey fur is officially on hiatus! I'm working on a big fat art project that I'm not going to want to post about until it's finished, which should be a bunch of months from now. So unless I change my mind, there will be no posting for a while.

Summer

2008-08-09T00:07:00.004-04:00

A couple weeks ago I finished another new piece, but it's taken me a while to get it posted. I'm still grouchy about how badly the photographs I took turned out, so until I get some better images, there are no details on the website. One picture. That's all you get.

It's a nice one, though. At least, it features a nice baby. If I do say so myself. (Which I do.)

(You can, actually, click here to get a bigger image than that one.)

I think of the piece as a companion piece to last year's Spring drawing, although I didn't mean it to be when I started it. I probably will do more. I love the seasons- they're metaphors that get in your bones.

This is one of the early text drawings that started me down this path. It's from 2004.

How and How Not to...

2008-06-22T09:43:00.002-04:00

I recently finished a new piece that's called How and How Not to Draw a Morning Glory.

It's a game, but it's also a map.

In the circles with the numbers (north, south, east and west) there are alternate moods. Each mood has arrows in it that show ways that the mood can lead you to work or not to work.

The arrows point to text that says either "Do Draw a Morning Glory" or "Do Not Draw a Morning Glory."

Each mood also has an associated place. "Contemplate Mortality," above, is the ocean. (The fish at the top of the circle is telling you so.)

In between the mood images, at NE, NW and SE and SW, there are variations and combinations of the basic moods. For instance, if you're in between "Contemplate Mortality" and "Get Pissed Off", you get this:

(You'll notice that death is eating a Dorito.)

Between "Get Pissed Off" and "Imagine Omniscience" gets you working.

Between "Imagine Omniscience" and "Fall in Love" is this, which could just have easily been something like, "My clothes/homemaking/numbers/jobs are my art".

And between falling in love and contemplating mortality is this circle, which says ""Dance with Ghosts."

I've started a new piece and am also working on some small drawings that are a little bit different for me- I'll post them later. In the meantime, if you want to see this piece larger, it's on the website here.

The WeeGee Board

2008-06-20T09:49:00.001-04:00

This New York Times feature on WeeGee's Naked City is really fabulous.

What I saw in New York

2008-06-18T05:27:00.005-04:00

Last week was amazing- I saw so much good art I'm set for life, and if someone would just give me a winning lottery ticket I'd move to New York in about half a second. (I love you Philly, but...dang.)

There was an amazing print show at the Brooklyn Museum called Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900. It was one of the best print shows I've seen ever. The Brooklyn Museum doesn't have the prints I liked online, but they do have some amazing Hiroshige images online for free here: One Hundred Views of Edo.

We all pretended to be zombies in the yellow light of Olafur Eliasson's Take Your Time exhibition at MOMA. We didn't see the whole exhibition, but the hallway with the yellow light was our favorite part of his stuff we did see. The yellow lights did something strange: they sucked the color out of everything that wasn't yellow or blue. Every color besides blue looked like a shade of yellow. Blue looked like a creepy purple. Which made people like my mom, who is a blue-eyed blonde, look like a perfect zombie. Her clothes, hair and skin were various shades of sickly yellow and her eyes were a blazingly surreal purple. Super cool.

We all really loved the Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing exhibition. Man, was that good. Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Tom of Finland, Raymond Pettibon...a whole bunch of amazing work was in that show. The following images are from the MOMA website; if you click the link above you can see many more great images from the exhibit.

Jockum Nordström. (Swedish, born 1963). Playtime for Dung-Hills. (2000). Pencil on paper, 17 3/4 x 24 3/8" (45.1 x 61.9 cm). Gift of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing. © 2008 Jockum Nordström

Jim Nutt. (American, born 1938). A Certain Distance Between Them. (1975). Ballpoint pen and pencil on paper, 10 x 13" (25.4 x 33 cm). The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. © 2008 Jim Nutt

Raymond Pettibon. (American, born 1957). No Title (Don't complicate...). 1987. Ink and gouache on paper, 24 x 18" (60.9 x 45.7 cm). Gift of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing. © 2008 Raymond Pettibon

Scottie Wilson. (Scottish, 1889-1972). Fantastic Flowers. n.d. Ink and crayon on paper, 14 1/8 x 10" (35.9 x 25.4 cm). Purchase

We also visited Cannonball Press. The guys there make a whole bunch of different kinds of work, but some of their best stuff is these huge prints that are done collaboratively.

(click for larger image. So worth it.)

When we visited Cannonball Press the lovely printers showed us a bunch of their geniusy work and gave us prints!

Hold Please, by Mike Houston

The print they gave me is by Mike Houston. It, um, expresses ire about interoffice memos and includes a little bitter squirrely man saying "F.U." So of course I love it, and plan to hang it in my office at work.

There's also a great print show in Philly, though, too, although unfortunately there's not much about it on the net. It's called Curious and Commonplace: European Popular Prints of the 1800s, and it includes this fantastic image, which is really the least of it- everything in the show is incredible, I swear. But you'll have to trust me, because the Philly Museum website will only let me link to this dinky little image. But if you click it you can see it bigger!

We saw lots more art, but I'm just hitting the highlights because I'm so behind on this blog. I finished a new piece yesterday and hope to post it tomorrow, but in any case if you're near Philly or New York, run run run and see these shows! And go buy some prints from Cannonball Press. They're great, funny, smart and and cheap. What's not to love?

Miss Fortune by Martin Mazorra.(Click for ordering info.)

Fraktur

2008-05-26T23:34:00.006-04:00

I'm almost done with a new piece, but I'm spending the next week or so looking at art in New York with my mom, Margie Simpson, and Tom Drucker, who are fabulous artists as well as fabulous relations of mine, so that new piece is going to have to sit on the drawing board for a little while. (That's not just an expression. I actually do have a drawing board.)

I've been looking at Pennsylvania Dutch drawings online. Their drawings are called "fraktur", or "fractur" and they're usually done to commemorate an event: a wedding, funeral, or birth. They're basically the most beautiful birth, marriage and death certificates ever. I'm putting some images of them online here, most of which I borrowed from frakturweb, an incredibly comprehensive site which includes extensive information about fractur and citations for each image.

This is by some guy who is known as the "Flat Parrot Artist."

There is also some really fascinating information online about a religious group that made lots of of fraktur called the Schwenkfelders. I love that word. It almost makes me want to get religion.

The new piece I'm doing is based on some early American board games I saw in an exhibition called Beyond This Time and Place, Children's Books in England at the Rare Book Collection at the Philadelphia Free Library. It's a great exhibition and was recently reviewed on artblog, as was my show at Gallery Joe.

I've seen lots of great stuff lately, much of which was done by people I know and like. Rob Matthews, Rubens Ghenov and Chris Davison have geniusy work up at Jenny Jaskey Gallery right now, and my pal Mauro Zamora won the Pew, which is great. My friend Eva Wylie has had a few beautiful exhibitions lately, most recently one at Vox Populi Gallery. I didn't get over there, but artblog reviewed it and I love how great it looks online.

The piece was called "Roaring Tulips." Too cool.

There is tons of good stuff happening in Philly right now. The ICA has Trenton Doyle Hancock, the Philly Museum has William Kentridge and there are a thousand more exhibits around town I haven't seen yet. The Wexler Gallery has a pretty interesting exhibition with some nice Damien Hirst prints in it, but I think the show was stolen by Joe Boruchow, a friend of the curator's who is in his first group show.

In addition to looking at lots of good art lately, my head is still spinning from seeing Lynda Barry talk, which was incredible. She's so smart it's scary, and she wraps her brilliance in humility and humor that make her words go down like the most nutritious cupcake ever. I'm reading her new book, What It Is, and loving it, but I can't wait for the podcast of the talk to come out so I can make everyone I know listen to it. My students are doomed.

Aw, shucks!

2008-05-20T08:49:00.002-04:00

If the Groundhog Sticks His Head Out and He Doesn't See Lynda Barry...

2008-05-12T02:37:00.005-04:00

I thought the nineties were a culturally backwards decade. And now I have proof. During the nineties, Lynda Barry's books went out of print.

I didn't notice this, because of course I had already gobbled them all up in the eighties. Which I'm not saying were perfect. But man. By the late nineties my students were beginning to make fun of the eighties, and although I always knew something was seriously wrong with this I never knew how to express it. I usually muttered about how their decade brought back beige. Now I know. At least we had Lynda Barry.

And she's back! Drawn and Quarterly, bless their souls, is publishing her new book. Apparently her last publisher dropped her. I'm fine with that- I was mad at them because her last book, 100 Demons, was incredibly great but hardly got any distribution. Drawn and Quarterly is also reissuing her old books, and apparently they're putting her on tour, too. If you don't own 100 Demons, go buy it right now. If you don't love it I personally will pay for your lobotomy.

The New York Times has an article about her this Sunday. The slideshow has beautiful images from the new book. And my lovely neighbors tell me she'll be coming to the Philadelphia Free Library on June 5th too. As is Jorie Graham! Cool! This decade is looking good!

Mommy, smoke me up a case of rabbits!

2008-05-10T02:00:00.005-04:00

Say kids, do you wish mommy and daddy would smoke more? Yes, yes you do. Or you would have had you been a kid when these cigarrette cards were around. It's a 52 card deck, so mom and dad had to get smoking if you wanted to play!

All the cards in this series are great. I had to restrain myself from putting in images of all 52, and I'm not kidding about how much I would have tried to compel my relatives to smoke if it meant getting my hands on some of these. You can see the whole set for yourself at the NY Public Library here.

The cigarette people did other games, too. Some of which I might not have killed my parents for. For instance:

Dominos.

Where are the crackpots of temps perdu?

2008-05-07T21:56:00.006-04:00

My opening was lovely! I had a great time. Everyone I talked to was insightful and intelligent and good looking. It was actually a bit strange. I'm so used to hearing odd things about my work at openings that I'm almost disappointed: it's like when the annoying guy moves out of the office next to you and the silence rings through the hallway where your irritation used to be.

My favorite weird opening story took place a few years ago at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, where I had installed this piece, which featured, as you can see, 9 foot tall badgers wearing dresses.

A slightly off-looking woman with a very prairie-ish dress came up to me at the opening and started asking me about badgers. Did I use source materials to draw my badgers? Why yes, I said, I did.
"Do badger stripes look like that?"
"Yes they do, I'm quite careful about the stripes."
"And where do badgers live? Do they live around here?"
"No, sadly, they're a prairie animal. We don't have badgers. They have them in Wisconsin."
"And badger teeth- do they look like that?"
"Well, you know, I couldn't find a reference for the badger teeth. I guess it's hard to photograph badgers with their mouths open, so I just made up the teeth."
"And how large are badgers?" she asked. I made a badger-sized shape with my hands. Her eyes got small and sneaky looking. At this point I knew something was odd, but I was so much in my polite-as-hell opening mode that I was incapable of running over to the wine and cheese table and hiding underneath it as I probably should have."And do badgers wear dresses?" She asked.

I totally didn't see it coming. I mumbled something dopey about how these were made up, metaphorical badgers and she looked at me triumphantly as if she'd caught me in a lie. She stalked off with a spring in her step.

Not one wack job talked to me at Gallery Joe the whole evening. Which is pretty crazy in itself; lunatic comments about my work at openings are the law of the universe, as far as I'm concerned. Thom and I tried to remember another such galactic event; we couldn't. He reminded me of the loon at an opening ten years ago who hissed my initials at me like a demented snake: S! S!

There must be something in the water. After this remarkably civilized opening I met some very nice collectors who bought Suspense, which is one of my favorite pieces. I love it when people I like buy work I like. Yay.

Show at Gallery Joe

2008-04-30T21:25:00.002-04:00

I just dropped off the work for my show at Gallery Joe, which, in case you're local, opens this Friday from 6:30 to 8:30. The show looks nice, thanks to Becky Kerlin's fabulous eye. She swooped back and forth across the gallery moving things around and making great decisions while making sure that I was happy with how things looked. What a swell gallerist she is. She also sold one of the pieces in the show already: a collector from the west coast bought March!

I also met the other artist in the show- Rachel Perry Welty, who was sitting on the floor slicing up fruit labels and sticking them on to the wall in a truly beautiful way. It's hard to get a read on those fruit label pieces on the internet- I didn't see a finished piece, but I saw enough to think it will look great in person once it's done.

Lots of my recent work is in the show: Suspense, March, Placate, Suspension of Disbelief, Efficacy, and an older piece that I really like, New Romance. There are also some new pieces in her drawers: I've been making some small drawings.

All I Have

Go To Sea

This piece refers to my favorite sentence in Moby Dick, which reads,

. . . whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

The internet provides this definition of hypos:

hypo: (Inflected form: hypos) hypochondria, extreme depression of mind or spirits often [but not always] centered on imaginary physical ailments.

Spectacle

This piece is called Megalomania, or Holland Carter Said in the NY Times that this year's Whitney Bienial was one of "low expectations"

The caterpillar in the image is a tomato hornworm. I love those ugly bugs- they have little eyes in their markings, and the eyes always seem to have really malignant expressions. If you've got the stomach to look at a big image of one, click here.

Mounds and mounds Of GENIUS

2008-04-24T19:41:00.003-04:00

I just went to see the Trenton Doyle Hancock exhibit at the Philly ICA. The exhibit is called "Wow That's Mean and Other Vegan Cuisine." It was organized by the fabulous Elyse Gonzales, who gets a giant gold star from me for bringing Hancock to Philadelphia. I am thrilled that I got to see the show and meet the artist in person. He's been one of my heroes for a long time.

Why is he my hero? Well, check this out.

Or better yet, this! The man's a genius.

He's swimming in his own personal mythology, which is a vastly populated world of comic book heroes and villans that he uses to translate his artistic impulses and personal experiences into archetypical forms. There's a whole cast of characters- Torpedo Boy, the Vegans, an ape family and these guys: the Mounds.

You can read more about him and the exhibit here but if you get a chance to go see it, do- he made 3D wallpaper for the ramp that's really amazing. If you want to know more about him, his segment on art21, is a great start. The art 21 website has lots of great info, but the video is better. I show it to my students every semester. They think he's nuts. I think he's nuts like a fox.

There were other Philadelphia artists & bloggers at the walkthrough, and I expect they'll write about the exhibit too. The indomitable Libby Rosoff and Roberta Fallon of artblog were at the show as was Rob Matthews, whose faboo blog is called Matthews the Younger.

When Aesop tells you to do something, don't do it...

2008-04-20T08:37:00.002-04:00

From Laura Gibbs again:

158. AESOP AND THE HOOLIGAN

There was a hooligan who struck Aesop with a stone. Aesop said, 'Well done!' and he even gave the boy a coin. Then he added, 'Confound it, that's all the cash I've got, but I'll show you more where that came from. Look, the man coming this way is a wealthy and important person; if you can hit him with a stone the same way you hit me, you'll get the reward you deserve.' The hooligan was convinced and did as Aesop told him, but his hope for a reward brought his reckless daring to ruin: he was arrested and paid the price for his crime on the cross.

Just read that last word again, if you missed it.

If a beetle asks you to do something, just do it, okay?

2008-04-19T22:12:00.002-04:00

I looked up a fable from Aesop that I hadn't heard of when I found this image online at the NYPL.

The image is an illustration of the fable of the eagle and the dung beetle, and the manuscript that I was looking at online has been translated by one Laura Gibbs, from whom comes this explanation of the image:

As he was being chased by an eagle, the hare ran to the dung beetle, begging the beetle to save him. The beetle implored the eagle to respect the hare's asylum, solemnly compelling him by the sacred name of Zeus and pleading with the eagle not to disregard him simply because of his small size. But the eagle brushed the beetle aside with a flick of his wing and grabbed the hare, tearing him to pieces and devouring him. The beetle was enraged and flew off together with the eagle to find the nest in which the eagle kept his eggs. After the eagle was gone, the beetle smashed all the eggs. When the eagle came back, he was dreadfully upset and looked for the creature who had smashed the eggs, intending to tear him to pieces. When it was time for the eagle to nest again, he put his eggs in an even higher place, but the beetle flew all the way up to the nest, smashed the eggs, and went away. The eagle grieved for his little ones and said that this must be the result of some angry plot of Zeus to exterminate the eagle race. When the next season came, the eagle did not feel secure keeping the eggs in his nest and instead went up to Olympus and placed the eggs in Zeus's lap. The eagle said to Zeus, 'Twice my eggs have been destroyed; this time, I am leaving them here under your protection.' When the beetle found out what the eagle had done, he stuffed himself with dung and went straight up to Zeus and flew right into his face. At the sight of this filthy creature, Zeus was startled and leaped to his feet, forgetting that he held the eagle's eggs inside his lap. As a result, the eggs were broken once again. Zeus then learned of the wrong that had been done to the beetle, and when the eagle returned, Zeus said to him, 'It is only right that you have lost your little ones, since you mistreated the beetle!' The beetle said, 'The eagle treated me badly, but he also acted very impiously towards you, O Zeus! The eagle did not fear to violate your sacred name, and he killed the one who had taken refuge with me. I will not cease until I have punished the eagle completely!' Zeus did not want the race of eagles to be wiped out, so he urged the beetle to relent. When his efforts to persuade the beetle failed, Zeus changed the breeding season of the eagles, so that it would take place at a time when the beetles were not found above ground.

(Note from Laura Gibbs: The fable of the dung beetle and the eagle is alluded to on three occasions by Aristophanes: Wasps 1448, Lysistrata 695 and Peace 127-34. In Caxton (6.2), the dung beetle is replaced by a weasel!)

Source: Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura Gibbs. Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.

You can read more fabulous translations of fables and buy the book here and you can see more images from the book here.

Film crew released!

2008-04-17T08:45:00.000-04:00

Phew! Read all about it here.

Yikes!

2008-04-15T13:33:00.003-04:00

A friend of my friend, Wes Kim, has been illegally detained in Nigeria! Here's the email Wes sent:

Hey, everyone,

I wanted to let you know that Sean Porter of Swingset Film & Audio, someone who helped a great deal with the production of COOKIES FOR SALE, is part of a film crew that's been detained in Nigeria while they were trying to film a documentary. You can follow the latest developments at Northwest Film Forum's blog, but I'm sure an email to Sen. Maria Cantwell thanking her for her support in finding a quick resolution to this mess would be appreciated by the filmmakers and their friends and family.

http://nwfilmforum.wordpress.com/?s=nigeria - link to NWFF's blog with background information about the detainment and suggested text for a thank-you message to Sen. Maria Cantwell

Best,
Wes Kim

Please write a note!

Mirrors

2008-04-11T21:37:00.004-04:00

A new piece, Mirrors, is finished and on my website.

You can see it larger, and take a look at some details, here.

I've been buzzing like a bee, getting ready for my show at Gallery Joe in May. This is the last large piece that I'm making for a while- from now until the opening I'm going to be sitting in parks all over Philadelphia, looking at daffodils and making small pieces for the file drawers.

The show will have my recent drawings and some fabulous sounding work by Rachel Perry Welty in the front. In the vault, which is the smaller space in the back, there will be a show about space, line and time that I'm looking forward to seeing. Sounds like it'll be good! The opening is on Friday, May 2nd, from 6:30-8:30. Come!

March

2008-03-26T03:02:00.004-04:00

A couple days ago I finished another new piece, March.

It's on my website here. You can see bigger images there.

The tiny text says, "Can't we dig some kind of pit-trap in its path?"

When I was posting about a drawing I made last year called Scale, I wrote about my fascination with morning glory vines. I referred to them as tiny snakes, and tried to describe how, when you watch them grow, they seem almost to demonstrate a consciousness in the way they search for and grab supports. My virtual pal Justyn sent me this link to a great video of morning glory vines that shows exactly what I mean.

In this piece the morning glories are snakes, but they're also symbols of the corrosive and beautiful passage of time. Anyone who gardens in Philadelphia- or rather, any wimp who gardens in Philadelphia- knows what I mean by this. Morning Glories are a weed here, and if you are once wimpy enough to let a morning glory flower in your garden you will have 500 of them the next year. I do this every summer. I love them, and I can't resist.

Shôchan no bôken: Adventures of Shôchan.

2008-03-23T03:26:00.004-04:00

Browsing around the NYPL image library site I came across a Japanese comic book from 1923 called The Adventures of Shôchan. It's not translated, but every page is scanned, and it's gorgeous in a very Herge style. And it predates Tintin. Tintin first appeared in 1929.

Here's Shôchan and his sidekick squirrel named Risu. Who, I'm sorry, is way cooler than Snowy. Apparently Shôchan is a youth journalist like Tintin, only he travels to way better places. Like, say, heaven.

Most of the pages are scanned at this size, and unfortunately there's no zooming in. You can see tantalizing bits of the action in the small panels.

And when I say action, I mean action.

It's not all tumbling over waterfalls, though: check this page out- it's an encounter with death.

There's a whole thing with some mice, a black cat and what I really hope is the squirrel in a white suit.

There are six volumes online. It looks like each volume has two large illustrations. Here Shôchan meets the vulture.

I could look at this image all day.

And here he beats down some red flying heads. WHY can't I read Japanese?

You can look at the whole set of Adventures online here , and there is plenty more to see. There are centaurs, crazy Norse looking horsemen and a whole lot more flying heads.

There doesn't seem to be a lot written online about Shôchan and Herge, but I'm not the only person to notice the resemblance. It's pretty insane. It looks to me like Herge stole the whole Shôchan concept, drawing style and formula. And I keep thinking that Tintin is wearing Shôchan's socks.

You can also see more Japanese book arts at the NYPL here. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan.

Placate

2008-03-10T23:15:00.003-04:00

Today I finished a new piece, Placate.

The text says,"Does it placate Mister Death to talk about him on and on? Is it polite to talk behind his back? Ought one not to invest heavily in puppies?"

Larger images are on my website here.

I borrowed a skull from my neighbor across the street so I could draw it in this piece. She's a lovely person, and she'd happened to mention that she had one while we were chatting on the street one time, so when I needed to draw a bony head I went tripping cheerily across the street to ask if I could borrow a cup of skull. I felt very jolly about the whole escapade while I was planning it. I loved the idea that my neighborhood, which has recently become extremely gentrified, still had enough artists in it to support such a wacky neighborly exchange.

But then she put the skull in my hand.

And it felt like a head. I wasn't ready for that. I thought it would feel like a plastic skeleton's head- like the kind of skull you see in anatomy classrooms. No. This skull was lumpy and individual, and it felt like it does when you touch the back of someone's head.

I pretended I was brave. I didn't want my neighbor to know that it was all I could do not to play hot potato with the skull until she took it out of my hands. I played it cool. Or tried to. When I got the skull I remembered that my neighbor had mentioned that she'd bought the skull on ebay. Which seemed very much worse when it was in my hands.

I thanked her profusely and then ran inside and got a towel so I didn't have to touch it. I hauled it up to my studio and spent the next several waking hours drawing it as fast as I could. Just so I could return it. With cavalier jokes. About the creepy rattling noise it made when it moved.

Next time I'm borrowing the puppy.

Suspension of Disbelief

2008-02-24T22:53:00.003-05:00

I finished a new piece this week, and I finally put images of it on the website. It's called, you guessed it, Suspension of Disbelief, and it's a bit of a gloomy piece. But it features a skeleton reading a book called "Being and Nuth", a moon wearing glasses, babies and lots of bugs. So what's not to like?

The main text says," I believe that one cannot afford not to believe in suspension of disbelief. " You can take a look at it and read some of the small text here. There are links to a larger image and details on that page if you want to check them out.

Sure they kill you, but they also educate and entertain!

2008-02-22T23:22:00.006-05:00

From the amazing NYPL: Cigarrette cards. I love these things. I thought about curating an exhibit of cigarrette cards, but it's probably better to look at them enlarged on the web than it would be to see them behind glass in a frame. These are from the "Colour in Nature" series. The back of each card has a little paragraph of info about each image. I've included a few card backs that I thought were funny, and I've picked the cards I liked the best. But they're all great. You can see the whole series online here.

I love that a Springbok pronks.

And I didn't even put in the three-pronged stickleback!

Libri Amicorum

2008-02-18T03:22:00.008-05:00

I've discovered a wormhole in the internet. It is the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. You must go there. But be careful!

When was reading through the descriptions of their collections yesterday I felt like I was going to come down with a case of the vapours if I didn't stop reading and take a little rest. Cigarette cards! Classic Zoologies! Medieval Manuscripts! Posters! Patterns! William Blake! Everything they have is fascinating, beautifully scanned and well documented, and there's hardly any of it I don't want to blog about. And they have 600,000 images. Really.

So. This week's little drop in the bucket? Memorials of Friendship, a book by Anne Wagner, who hung around with Percy Byssche Shelley.

Z

You can see the whole thing here- and there's lots more to see. More fantastic images and lots of great and funny little poems and dedications. The guide to the collection is here.

Daibutsu

2008-02-15T02:06:00.009-05:00

Speaking of the efficacy of repeated images, look at these images of the Daibutsu at Kamakura. This one was on the homepage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, which got me started on this daibutsu kick.

From the Metropolitian Museum of Art
John La Farge (1835–1910)
The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest's Garden, 1887

This image is from the collection of the NY Public Library.
Image details are here.

Attribution unknown.
From the NY Public Library

Daibatsu means "large buddha," but the term is often used in the west to refer to that large Buddha because of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Buddha at Kamakura." It's a fun read- you can really hear how much Kipling likes the word Kamakura.

The Buddha at Kamakura

O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the 'heathen' pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!

To him the Way, the Law, apart,
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda's Lord, the Bodhisat,
The Buddha of Kamakura.

For though he neither burns nor sees,
Nor hears ye thank your Deities,
Ye have not sinned with such as these,
His children at Kamakura.

Yet spare us still the Western joke
When joss-sticks turn to scented smoke
The little sins of little folk
That worship at Kamakura --

The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies
That flit beneath the Master's eyes.
He is beyond the Mysteries
But loves them at Kamakura.

And whoso will, from Pride released,
Contemning neither creed nor priest,
May feel the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamakura.

Yea, every tale Ananda heard,
Of birth as fish or beast or bird,
While yet in lives the Master stirred,
The warm wind brings Kamakura.

Till drowsy eyelids seem to see
A-flower 'neath her golden htee
The Shwe-Dagon flare easterly
From Burmah to Kamakura,

And down the loaded air there comes
The thunder of Thibetan drums,
And droned -- "Om mane padme hums" --
A world's-width from Kamakura.

Yet Brahmans rule Benares still,
Buddh-Gaya's ruins pit the hill,
And beef-fed zealots threaten ill
To Buddha and Kamakura.

A tourist-show, a legend told,
A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,
So much, and scarce so much, ye hold
The meaning of Kamakura?

But when the morning prayer is prayed,
Think, ere ye pass to strife and trade,
Is God in human image made
No nearer than Kamakura?
---
It turns out that God in human image was made nearer- or at least bigger- than in Kamakura: there's a larger one at Nara, and in Japan when people use the word daibutsu, that's the one they mean.

Information about this statue is here.

The biggest ancient daibutsu in Japan, though, is at Nihon-Ji.

I love the old photographs of these giant buddhas. Here's one from Hiogo Japan.

Image details from the NYPL

An unfinished Buddha from Sumatra.

Image details from the NYPL

And an Indonesian giant buddha.

Image details from the NYPL

There are more images of the Kamakura Buddha here, and you can see more daibutsu pictures here.

There's also a crazily beautiful and incredibly dopey photograph of someone pretending to be a daibutsu in the NYPL collection.

The kicker comes in the caption:

"Ruth St. Denis in Light of Asia, a religious drama given at the Krotona Theosophical Society with Walter Hampden as Buddha."

Jeez, Walter.

The most beautiful images I found are from the NY Public Library's incredible digital image collection, which is so vast and great I'm never, ever, going to be able to stop looking at it. Eventually I'm going to fall asleep in a puddle of drool with my eyeballs glued to my computer screen.

But even if I look really good doing it I will not assert my resemblance to this guy.

The Sleeping Buddha of Wo Fu Ssû in Beijing. From the NYPL.

Efficacy

2008-02-06T00:57:00.000-05:00

I recently finished a new piece called Efficacy. You can see it larger on my website here, but I haven't taken detail pictures yet- I'm hard at work on another new drawing that I'm rather excited about, so that might have to wait. It might be a while, actually-I have a show of these drawings coming up at Gallery Joe in May, which feels like it's right around the corner, so until then I might just chain myself to the trusty ballpoint and lock myself in the studio. Picture me looking hungry and hairy, dragging around a small pen on a very heavy chain attached to my ankle.

I am not worthy!

2008-01-11T08:58:00.000-05:00

I got a random compliment by email this morning from Tony Fitzpatrick! He likes my work! He saw it on the Gallery Joe website.

I'm going to fall over dead. Tony Fitzpatrick is a total genius printmaker. Look at this work. Holy crap.

The Work of Art in the Age of My Cell Phone

2007-12-05T08:46:00.000-05:00

Sunday's New York Times magazine had an interesting article about museums making digital versions of masterpieces. The article turned on the idea of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' new fund raising idea: they sell little images of their artworks as cell phone wallpapers. I thought it sounded pretty cheesy when I read about it, but then I went to the site and saw this image.

Oni at a Barbershop from the series The Popularization of Civilization
Kitazawa Rakuten

Late Meiji era, 1905
Color lithograph; ink on card stock
Overall: 8.8 x 13.8 cm (3 7/16 x 5 7/16 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards
2002.987

I want it. And it's not the only one I want, to tell the truth- there are lots of nice ones, and I want them all. It turns out I have no problem with having a tiny digitized masterpiece on my cellphone.

I don't feel as sanguine about the other example of masterpiece digitization cited in the article. The image in question, The Last Supper, is one that I've never seen outside of a reproduction in any case, but this latest reproduction has gone too far. There is a website that shows DaVinci's Last Supper in amazing fly-eye-view high resolution: one can zoom in to an astounding degree and see individual paint flakes. It's fun, but it definitely offends the original. But that's because of the music. Check it out.

Rakuten Kitazawa, who made the image that I need for my cell phone, is called the father of anime. He was an early cartoonist in Japan who, among other things, worked for an American comic magazine called "Box of Curious." You can read more about him here.

Suspense

2007-11-13T20:11:00.001-05:00

I recently posted a new drawing, Suspense, on my website. It's going to Aqua Art Miami with Gallery Joe this December.

There are details on the site that show the way the images play with the idea of narrative suspense, but it's better if you can see the piece in person. There is a plot that flows through the large S that involves insects, birds, childbirth, water, falling objects and people I know.

These little arrows at the end of the S say "Narrative", "Rhythm" and "Symmetry."

Mr. Fruit Face

2007-10-10T08:54:00.000-04:00

The New York Times today has a lovely slideshow of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's work, which is on exhibit at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.

From the article:

"Mr. Fruit Face, as a friend of mine disdainfully calls him, has always been a guaranteed hit with the Transformer-age crowd. But his art is more serious and self-important than that. You can imagine him to have been the sort of initially jocular, learned dinner party companion whose arrogance makes itself known by the salad course. That he inspired thousands of appalling 20th-century Surrealists, apparently shocked at the genius of conceiving a gherkin to replace a nose, or a rose a cheek, isn’t his fault."

Maira Kalman

2007-09-29T08:58:00.000-04:00

This week the New York Times made its special "Times Select" features available to everyone for free. So now people can see Maira Kalman's monthly illustrated columns on the web. Check them out!

All work and no play makes Monkey Fur a dull blog?

2007-09-10T08:16:00.000-04:00

Oh, Finland. This weekend the Finns hosted the finals of the International Air Guitar contest. My favorite was last year's defending champion. But he came in second.

The french guy, "Moshe Pitt" (pronounced "Moe-she Peet") won. Maybe because his routine featured a really spectacular ending. Which you can see here.

Our little human lives

2007-09-07T18:38:00.000-04:00

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Dang. Madeline L'Engle died. She was one of my favorites when I was growing up. The quote is from a New York Times Article about her.

The Sense of Scale

2007-08-24T19:25:00.000-04:00

I just posted a new piece on the website: it's a drawing called Scale.

You can see the piece larger on my website here, and if you scroll down on that page it will take you through some details that show more of the text, which can get pretty tiny.

The little person in the banner is a self portrait.

The leaning skeleton and the following images function as letters. I'm hoping people get it. (Do you get it? Can you read the word between "what" and "me"?)

While I was trying to find reference material for this piece I came across lots of interesting odds and ends that I didn't use in the text of the piece.

I learned a great deal about dragonfly eyes. They're amazing. The most complicated eyes in the world, apparently, and they give the insects nearly 360 degree vision. They're also very beautiful.

This is the "Female Beautiful Demoiselle" (aka Calopteryx virgo) from the Dragons and Damsels blog . (You can see more here.) I love that blog, and am excited every time there's a new post. I got the reference image for the giant dragonfly image from that site.

I learned about the dragonfly eyes from a very long winded website that turned out to be devoted to the idea that dragonflies, because they are so amazing, are living arguments for creationism.

They are pretty fabulous. They can fly 65 mph and stop on a dime, they move in a peculiarly efficient fashion, and they've been around for thousands of years. Evolution, according to that site, was just not up to the dragonfly. (Although the military, according to the same site, was. Apparently helicopters are based on dragonfly flight research.)

I also wanted to get some morning glory facts. I remembered reading somewhere that Charles Darwin had observed the twining of a morning glory from his sickbed, and while I was trying to find that reference I came across some work he did on self-fertilized morning glories. Most of his self-fertilized morning glory plants failed, but one, which was a sixth generation plant, grew taller than the others and produced strong, tough offspring. He named it "Hero" and referred to it as such in the transcripts of his work.

I never did find the sickbed reference, but I remember that Darwin and his son timed the average time it takes a morning glory to rotate around a support. It's fast. Morning glories grow outside my studio window and I often watch them move while I'm working. The tops of the plants are like little snake heads that twirl around until they reach a support that will sustain them.

If one sits in one place long enough to watch one twine around a support one gets the idea that the plant is making choices. They do seem to try to avoid twining around their own vines, and they always turn clockwise, which can give a group of them the air of all looking at the same thing at the same time. They seem, as I wrote in the piece, to be moving just slowly enough that one could catch them at it.

Here's how that thought looked in the piece.

Notice the bug eyes.

Ink reviews

2007-07-26T17:05:00.000-04:00

I just got back from a trip to Canada. While I was away I got the news that some lovely person bought my Spring piece and that the Ink exhibition at Gallery Joe was written up in lots of Philadelphia newspapers! Reviews of the show were written by Edith Newhall at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lori Hill of the Philadelphia City Paper, and Roberta Fallon in the Philadelphia Weekly and on artblog. Too cool.

How! How!

2007-07-10T12:14:00.000-04:00

The Megatherium Club, circa 1850s. From the Smithsonian Institute Archives.

Members of the Megatherium Club greeted each other by shouting "How! How!" This, besides being pretty fun, was supposed to be the cry of the ancient megatherium, below.

The megatherium was a prehistoric giant sloth that was about as big as a modern elephant. Members of the Megatherium Club were also big on serenading the ladies, which one hopes was also based on the behavior of the ancient animal.

According to the New York Times, indigenous people in the amazon jungles say that the giant sloth a) still exists b) prefers to be referred to as the "mapinguary" and c) smells really terrible.

The article emphasizes the mythological hoo-doo aspect of these assertions until you get to the very end, where the continued existence of the megatherium begins to seem rather credible.

Megatherium skeleton sterograph from the British Museum, 1857

I think I'm going to put a megatherium in my new drawing, and I wish I could put one in my back yard. Although they might not be so great for the landscape.

When one searches the internet for images of the megatherium one comes up with an inordinate number of attacks on innocent trees.

Megatherium by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1889) from Johnsons Natural History, 1871 United States

And occasionally worse.

I have no idea what's going on in this image, but that's a megatherium skeleton, and I assume the bikini girl has something to do with the serenade.

As interesting as megatheriums are, what I really like is looking at images of them on the internet. The megatherium seems to have developed its own peculiar pictorial traditions over the years. In the 19th century images they have pointy noses and attack trees.

Megatherium by Joseph Smit (1836-1929) from Extinct Monsters 1892 England

In the modern era the nose has shunk, the hair is hairier and the settings are pure technicolor.

(This image is fantastic, and it's even better when it's huge.)

I did find one atypical visual incarnation of the giant sloth from an Italian webpage full of fantastic paintings that deal with evolution. This image makes the megatherium look less like a fierce twenty-first century yeti-rat than a gentle giant.

Who, perhaps, has just finished serenading his armadillo, and is now wondering,"Why? Why?"

Ink at Gallery Joe

2007-07-07T15:17:00.001-04:00

Last night was the opening for Ink, the summer group show I'm in at Gallery Joe. The place was packed, and it was great to see so many people who I like at the opening. There is some beautiful work in the gallery right now.

I especially like this little piece by Roland Flexner.

While I was at the opening I talked about rapidographs with Astrid Bowlby while I looked at one of her fabulous obsessive drawings, and then I moved over to look at another piece and found myself reading the text of a conversation about pens. "Is that a rapidograph?" I read. It was drawn in a cartoon speech bubble on the last page of a huge accordion book that was full of text and partial sketches that were done by an artist I wasn't familiar with.

It turns out that the book is one of many that Martin Wilner made while he recorded conversations he hears on the public transportation in New York. Martin has volumes and volumes of transit drawings. The one I saw is, I think, number 134. Collectively, they're called The Journal of Evidence Weekly.

I asked him about the problems of drawing in public and he said modestly that he has figured out how to be unobtrusive and that he hasn't been hassled for years. At least not in the last seven years, he added. Before that, he said...(insert gruesome story here.)

His work is amazing. You can see pictures of other journals in the project here, but it's much better to check out the piece in person at Gallery Joe if you get a chance. There is tons of lovely stuff on view- it's a swelligant show. The exhibition is up until July 28th.

Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 127.

In addition to seeing lots of nice people and experiencing an odd pen coincidence at the opening, I found out that Lori Hill of the Philadelphia City Paper said nice things about my work in her preview of the exhibition. Which is always swell.

Thanks Liberta!

2007-07-04T22:59:00.000-04:00

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosoff complimented my Possesions piece on artblog! Neat!

Upcoming show details

2007-06-22T21:45:00.000-04:00

The following is the press release for a group show I'm in at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia next month. I have two pieces in the show, Spring, which I just wrote about, and Possessions, which is pictured below on the press release. Come to the opening if you're in town!

Samantha Simpson, Possessions, 2007, Ball point pen on paper, 24 x 18 inches

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 22, 2007

INK!

Philadelphia, PA—Gallery Joe will open INK!, this year’s summer group show curated by Sarah Holloran, on First Friday, July 6. There will be an opening reception on Friday evening from 6 – 8 pm, and the show will continue through July 28.

Eleven artists will exhibit ink drawings in the show. All of these artists have selected ink as their primary medium drastically shifting away from its previous associations with preparatory work or the banal markings of our everyday lists. From the calligraphic washes of Gil Kerlin’s work, to the intimate books of Sharyn O’Mara and Martin Wilner, to the miniaturized markings of Jacob El Hanani. Roland Flexner’s work even appears to float across the surface of the page, while Samantha Simpson employs a ballpoint pen to create elaborate drawings that integrate text and imaginative illustrations of nature and figures. Ink takes on many colors, forms, and even textures in this show.

Artists exhibiting include:

William Anastasi
Astrid Bowlby
Emily Brown
Jacob El Hanani
Roland Flexner
Simon Frost
Gil Kerlin
Linn Meyers
Sharyn O’Mara
Samantha Simpson
Martin Wilner

INK! will run from July 6 – July 28, 2007. The gallery will be closed in August.

For additional information or to schedule an appointment, contact Sarah Holloran, 215.592.7752, FAX 215.238.6923, or email mail@galleryjoe.com.

Farewell painting, sucks to you!

2007-06-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

Samuel Morse worked on this painting of his daughter Susan WHILE he was inventing Morse code. It was his last painting; he had decided to give up art in favor of inventing because it looked like the pay might be better.

These ancient painters are so inspiring. I think I'll spend my spare time cloning stuff.

(You can read more about this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it's their artwork of the day. The Met's front page features a new piece from their collection every day, so it makes a swell home page for art weenies like me.)

Spring

2007-06-13T21:19:00.000-04:00

I just finished a new piece, Spring, that is going to be in a summer group show at Gallery Joe. If you're in Philadelphia, stop by the opening on first Friday, July 6th.

Another piece that I've written about on this blog, Possessions, will also be included in the exhibition.

Spring is up on my website here if you want to take a closer look.

I like this piece, not least because I think it includes my best skeleton ever.

Who, incidentally, is getting up to no good with the very same ballpoint pens that I use to make these drawings..

The piece includes references to the stuff that's happening right outside my studio window lately: there are raspberry leaves, morning glories, bees, wasps and irises. This iris lasted for exactly as long as I needed to get it in the drawing.

Clara the rhino

2007-06-09T14:07:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times has an article about the restoration of a painting of Clara, a world famous rhinoceros who toured Europe in the 1700s.

Clara, by Jean Baptiste Oudry

The painting is at the Getty Museum, and it shows a life sized Clara looking newly dapper after languishing for years in the basement of the Staatliches Museum in Holland.

(The article mentions that the conservator wore a tie the whole time he was working on the painting.)

Clara the rhinoceros was adopted by a director of the Dutch East India Company, Jan Sichterman, when she was one month old. Clara was described as a "hideous animal of the female gender" but Sichterman, who raised her after her mother had been killed by hunters, let Clara move freely around his house- she navigated around the furniture without a problem and ate her food from a plate.

When she got too big for the house, she was sold to Douwemout Van der Meer, a 36 year old sea captain who hoped to make a living exhibiting her around the world. It's important to note that at this time- Clara was sold in 1741- the rhino was a very exotic animal.

The rhino was classed as a semi-mythological beast. In bestiaries in the 1500s it was confused with the unicorn, which was called the monocerous. People in Europe had heard of them, but weren't sure they really existed. This is the first known image of a rhino- it was published in 1515 in Lisbon, where a live rhino had arrived by ship eight weeks earlier.

Durer's famous rhino is a woodcut made in the same year from written descriptions of the Lisbon rhino, which accounts for its relative accuracy- but check out the horn on its back.

Durer drew this rhino too- it's much more feral looking.

The horn on its back was part of the mythology about rhinos, as was the fact, promulgated by Pliny the Elder in 23 CE, that the rhino was deadly enemy of the elephant, which it was said to gore with its horn.

The Lisbon rhino from 1515 was a gift for a pope. Before he got to the pope he spent time in the menagerie of a king who happened to have an albino elephant on hand. The king wanted to test Pliny's theory, so he set the rhino and the elephant up for a showdown. The elephant, terrified, turned tail and ran. The elephant's name was Hanno.

Woodcut of Hanno on pamphlet by Philomathes (Rome, c. 1514)

The Lisbon rhino died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. There were other attempts to give rhinos to European royalty but the difficulty of getting them across the ocean alive made them pretty rare. If you're interested in the history of rhino migration to Europe until 1515 (I know I am!) you can check out a detailed history here.

Clara was to become a far more successful traveler. Captain Van der Meer sailed with Clara from Calcutta to Rotterdam, keeping her skin from drying out by slathering her with fish oil and feeding her what he correctly estimated as her daily nutritional requirement of 150 pounds of vegetable matter a day. He did very well exhibiting her across Europe. Empress Maria Teresa, of the royal family of the Holy Roman Empire, was particularly fond of her private audiences with Clara.

Captain Van der Meer became Baron Van der Meer. He not only exhibited Clara, but did a swift trade in Clara souvenirs, which were proudly displayed by members of the nobility and the general public who had been fortunate enough to see Clara. Here she is in Vienna in a 1746 engraving by Elias Baeck.

One year later Mannheim made this image of Clara, das Nashorn . Note that Clara, despite her tolerance for Empress Maria Teresa, is fiercely goring an elephant in the background. Click here to see a bigger image.)

Poems and songs were written about Clara, french naval boats were named after her (Rhinocéros, not Clara) and in Paris men could have their wigs styled à la rhinocéros.

She even made it into anatomy books.

Clara the rhinoceros (1742)
Engraving by Jan Wandelaar for Bernhard Siegfried Albinus' book: Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani. Printed in Leyden by James and Henry Verbeek, 1747.

Eventually Clara made it to Rome, where she either rubbed off her horn or it was removed. In any case it didn't stop her from being painted, this time by Pietro Longhi in 1751.

She continued to travel around Europe until she ended up in London, where she died at around 20 years old.

Jean Goujon: Obelisk
1549

There's more about Clara in a recent Chicago Sun Times Article, and I got a lot of my information from Wikipedia. There's also a book I'm going to have to get, Clara's Grand Tour, by Glynis Ridley. While I was researching Clara I came across another famous rhino, Cornelius the first, who ran for a seat in the Canadian House of Commons in 1965. If anyone can tell me more about Cornelius I'll be very happy.

Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk

2007-05-26T09:15:00.000-04:00

Wow. I want to work somewhere where the departments are labeled with references to Dante's Divine Comedy. Dang. From today's New York Times.

The Abyss

2007-05-22T07:48:00.001-04:00

There's a great slide show over at the New York Times today that shows deep sea creatures that have never before been photographed underwater. They're collected in a book called The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvain.

The images are amazing. They're like something out of Haeckel.

The New York Times article mentions William Beebe, who was a naturalist who first described some of these creatures. People thought he was making it all up, as you would, if someone described, say, this guy.

This is a dumbo octopus from the Monterey Bay ocean floor.

Beebe encouraged people to join the "Society of Wonders" he visited with his home made diving helmet. He wanted other people to see his "Helmet Kingdom."

That's him in the home-made helmet. His interest in exploring the depths of the ocean prompted the development of the Bathysphere, which is a pretty amazing story in itself.

Beebe put out a call to inventors to work on something that would be capable of withstanding the pressures of the ocean depths. He received lots and lots of crackpot plans from people around the country at his office at the New York Zoological Society. By the time Otis Barton, who had a good plan, got to him, it was necessary for Barton to arrange a special introduction to Beebe in order to overcome Beebe's assumption that he was just another crackpot. Beebe had ignored his letters. Barton had to offer to fund the building of the bathysphere himself in order to get Beebe's support. Luckily, Barton was a millionaire.

The introduction worked: Beebe signed on. This picture shows Beebe and Otis Barton with the bathysphere. Beebe is on the left. Barton has the jaunty hat.

The bathysphere had a palm leaf fan inside it for air circulation and Beebe and Barton had to squish themselves in through the small portholes head first. The windows were made of quartz.

Beebe and Barton made 35 dives, and broke many, many deep water diving records. One of their trips, in 1934, got to as low as 3,028 feet below sea level. The two of them got giddy from too much oxygen, were nearly decapitated by high pressure water leaks, and were recorded talking on the telephone the whole time. The rule was that if they didn't talk for five seconds at a time they were to be pulled back up to the surface.

Beebe wrote: "The only other place comparable to these marvelous nether regions must surely be naked space itself, out far beyond atmosphere, between the stars, where sunlight has no grip upon the dust and rubbish of our planetary air, where the blackness of space, the shining planets, comets, suns and stars must really be closely akin to the world of life as it appears to the eyes of an awed human being in the open ocean a half mile down." 2

This is the Ping-Pong Tree Sponge, from Claire Nouvain's book.

Beebe took a fair amount of flack for writing popular books. A scientist at the time said that Beebe's descriptions of the lights he described seeing on the fish he observed from the bathysphere "may be a 'phosphorescent coelenterate whose lights were beautified by halation in passing through a misty film breathed onto the quartz window by Mr. Beebe's eagerly appressed face."1

He's a fun writer. His article "A Dark and Luminous Blue" describes a deep sea diving trip in the Bathysphere. I've quoted some of this article below.

Lights now brightened and increased, and at 1100 feet I saw more fish and other organisms than my prebathysphere experience had led me to hope to see on the entire dive. With the light on, several chunky little hatchet-fish approached and passed through; then a silver-eyed larval fish two inches long; a jelly; suddenly a vision to which I can give no name, although I saw others subsequently. It was a network of luminosity, delicate, with large meshes, all aglow and in motion, waving slowly as it drifted. Next a dim, very deeply built fish appeared and vanished; then a four-inch larval eel swimming obliquely upward; and so on. This ceaseless telephoning left me breathless and I was glad of a hundred feet of only blue-blackness and active sparks. . . .

Suddenly in the distance a strong glow shot forth, covering a space of perhaps eight inches. Not even the wildest guess would help with such an occurrence. Then the law of compensation sent, close to the window, a clear-cut, three-inch, black anglerfish with a pale, lemon-colored light on a slender tentacle. All else my eye missed, so I can never give it a name.

One great source of trouble in this bathysphere work is the lag of mind behind instantaneous observation. For example, at 1300 feet a medium-sized, wide-mouthed angler came in sight, then vanished, and I was automatically describing an eight-inch larval eel looking like a transparent willow leaf, when my mind shot back to the angler and demanded how I had seen it. I had recorded no individual lights on body or tentacle, and now I realized that the teeth had glowed dully, the two rows of fangs were luminous. It is most baffling to gaze into outer darkness, suddenly see a vision, record the bare facies--the generality of the thing itself--and then, in the face of complete distraction by another spark or organism, to have to hark back and recall what special characters escaped the mind but were momentarily etched upon the retina. On this point I had thoroughly coached Miss Hollister at the other end of the telephone, so I constantly received a fire of questions, which served to focus my attention and flick my memory. Again and again when such a question came, I willfully shut my eyes or turned them into the bathysphere to avoid whatever bewilderment might come while I was searching my memory for details of what had barely faded from my eye. . .

At 2000 feet I made careful count and found that there were never less than ten or more lights--pale yellow and pale bluish--in sight at any one time. Fifty feet below I saw another pyrotechnic network, this time, at a conservative estimate, covering an extent of two by three feet. I could trace mesh after mesh in the darkness, but could not even hazard a guess at the cause. It must be some invertebrate form of life, but so delicate and evanescent that its abyssal form is quite lost if ever we take it in our nets. Another hundred feet and Mr. Barton saw two lights blinking on and off, obviously under control of the fish. . . .

At 2300 some exclamation of mine was interrupted by a request from above to listen to the tug's whistles saluting our new record, and my response was, ``Thanks ever so much, but take this: two very large leptocephali have just passed through the light, close together, vibrating swiftly along; note--why should larval eels go in pairs?" And with this the inhabitants of our dimly remembered upper world gave up their kindly efforts to honor us. On down we went through a rich, light-filled 2400, and to rest at 2500 feet, for a long half hour. . . .

The several nodes of high lights of which I have written occur on every descent, but there is in addition a compounding of sensations. At first we are quick to see every light, facile in sending up notes, but when we have used up most of our adjectives it is difficult to ring changes on sparks, lights, and darkness. More and more complete severance with the upper world follows, and a plunging into new strangenesses, unpredictable sights continually opening up, until our vocabularies are pauperized, and our minds drugged.

Over two hours had passed since we left the deck and I knew that the nerves both of my staff and myself were getting ragged with constant tenseness and strain. My eyes were weary with the flashing of eternal lights, each of which had to be watched so carefully, and my mind was surfeited with visions of the continual succession of fish and other organisms, and alternately encouraged and depressed by the successful or abortive attempts at identification. So I asked for our ascent.

Beebe and Barton's Bathysphere telephone was connected to Gloria Hollister, Beebe's research associate. She was the first woman to go in the Bathysphere: Beebe surprised her with a trip on her 30th birthday. Her alumni magazine is very proud, and they should be- two years after Beebe's record dive she was leading expeditions into the interior of British Guiana for the New York Zoological society.

The story of the development of the Bathysphere is really fascinating: you can read about it at this great website, and there's a book about it that looks pretty fabulous too: Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss by Bradford Matsen.

1. "Natural Man," by Robert Henry Welker, p.139, quoted from this website, where I got most of my information.

2. The National Geographic Magazine, "A Half Mile Down," Dec. 1934, p. 704, quoted from the website above.

Zoe Strauss Under I-95

2007-05-06T19:41:00.000-04:00

I went to see Zoe Strauss' massive installation under i-95 yesterday. She does a show under the freeway every year, but I've always missed it for one reason or another. I'm so glad I finally made it.

Zoe Strauss takes photographs of gritty Philly life, and the friend I went to the show with was worried that her I-95 event was going to be like some freaky scene from the movie Pecker. It wasn't an unreasonable analogy.

Zoe, like the hero in Pecker, photographs street life in a city that seems quaint to New York. She's not in Baltimore, but her pictures show Philadelphia, among other things, in all its poverty and roughness. It's not sweet work, but it's funny and humane and absurd, and it's very Philly.

I'm not sure how to explain what I mean by that, but I keep flashing back to a memory I have of a student talking to Zoe about her work this fall. One of my students, a smart, very political guy who I imagine has a more than usually vivid acquaintance with the implications of empty pockets, piped up.

"So I've heard that you COULD sell your work for a whole bunch of money, but you choose not to. Could you EXPLAIN that?"

She did her best. She said that she was going to stop selling to people at reasonable prices because she was a big sellout. He nodded, and then she explained. "No, I'm joking. I want to make art that I can afford. I might go to one of those big galleries, I don't know. But I want to make art that the people in my photos can buy."

It's weird to think about the people at the Whitney Biennial looking at her work. The Whitney is a hell of a white box, and one can imagine pictures of the Philadelphia poor turning into something else- some hideous kind of lawn-jockey accessory in the face of all that big museum money.

She's in a tough position, because her work, and what she's trying to do, is absolutely noble. But the art world isn't. It's partly noble. I hoped that her work would always be able to transcend the hype that gathered around it. But I wasn't sure.

When my friend and I got to the I-95 show, we were completely reassured. It couldn't have been less like a John Waters movie. Partly it was because her work is too good, and partly it was because the space is too large.

The place she does the shows, under the freeway behind a Target, is HUGE. She said in her talk that she'd decided she'd do shows down there for ten years. Until one sees the space one has no idea how insane an undertaking that is- it's like committing to fill half a football field with art every year. She had a million photos in there. And they're all really interesting. The size of the space meant that it was impossible to have any kind of art-scenester thing going in there, and that lots of different kinds of people could and did view the work without feeling uncomfortable.

Plus she gave it all away at the end of the show.

What a freaking genius.

One has to earn the sparkling green thumbnail...

2007-05-03T08:01:00.000-04:00

The New York Times today has an article about Patrick Blanc, a botanist who invented the plant wall. It's a structure of steel mesh and non-biodegradable felt that allows low light plants to grow vertically inside or outside in low light. The article has pictures of his house, which sounds like an incredible frog palace, but I prefer his large scale work, like the outside of the Musee de Quay Branlee in Paris, below.

This is Les Halles, in Avignon.

Below is a wall he made in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

He's done a million things, and they're all beautiful. There's a great Flash slide show of his work here.

His house is pretty good too, though.

All of which, in my opinion, earns him the right to look like this.

It's all about the process?

2007-04-30T20:17:00.000-04:00

I'm excited about working these days, not least because I have a show of my new drawings scheduled at Gallery Joe next May. But a lot has been going on in my life lately, and it's been a crazy time to make art. I moved in to a new apartment in my building this month, and I've been dealing with the usual moving stresses: not being able to find anything, wishing I were a minimalist instead of a hoarder and seriously contemplating dumping our remaining unpacked boxes out in the street to be run over by semi trucks. There are a thousand end-of-the-year teaching details to take care of and I'm preparing for a sabbatical next year. Plus it's spring.

But that's not the problem.

The problem is the bees.

Not the dying bees. The live bees. The ones who hate art.

Here's the deal. I do all my work sitting in my comfortable chair overlooking my tiny roof deck container garden, which holds a bird bath and overlooks fantastic magnolia and cherry trees.

I draw in front of the open screen door, and I look up to watch the blue jays and the squirrels drink from my bird bath, and I take breaks to water my lilacs and irises and to draw bugs and sparrows and whatever else comes to the rooftop. It's a blissful routine.

Today, though, I went out to water the plants and was immediately attacked by two giant bees. They're huge. They buzzed my head- one of them hit my hair. I went back inside. I tried again later. Same result. Again. Nearly fell off the roof. I should explain that what I call my roof deck is really just the roof of my neighbor's apartment. It's a three story drop.

I retreated into the studio and closed the screen door behind me, which led me to notice that there are yellow jackets building a nest right above the corner of the screen, where it doesn't really close. Where there's a two inch gap.

(The image is not upside down, the wasps are. They're hanging from the inside of my door frame like Spiderman.)

This yellow jacket action appears to have irritated these other giant bees, who are constantly bombarding the door area with patrols. I closed the sliding glass doors and watched them all for a while, imagining bee vs. wasp feuds or, more likely bee vs. human feuds. I imagined being told, post-fall, that it was nothing personal, that I just got caught up in this whole bee-vs.-human episode that was being fought on other fronts right now. Wrong place at the wrong time, said the bee that was explaining the cause of my untimely death. It got hotter and hotter in my chair as the closed door caused my studio to heat up and the wasps calmly went about building their nest.

I decided my plants could depend on the rain if the bees were going to be that way and lugged all my stuff downstairs to the new apartment, which has back yard. I set myself up with a sun hat on top of my geeky magnifying visor. I looked up at the birds and the manic, giant bees patrolling my roof and got to work on the idyllic nature drawing I'm making these days. In between bouts I sucked up to the neighborhood cat. She eats butterflies. So I can hope for the best.

Ubu in the Rain

2007-04-15T13:34:00.000-04:00

Is it just me, or is this image from a recent New York Times article the oddest picture of two politicians ever? Does it remind the rest of you of the sound stage scene from Singing in the Rain? Are Putin and King Abdullah about to do internationally significant dance of love? Or crawl through a tunnel of Vaseline?

I might be thinking this way because I went to the William Kentridge lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently. Kentridge showed scenes from two versions of a play, Ubu and the Truth Commission, that was based on a mix of Ubu Roi and testimony from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It sounded like a dubious project- Ubu Roi is a funny, depraved, absurdist play, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony, well, isn't. (Kind of like mixing international politics and Singing in the Rain.) Kentridge showed videos of two versions of the project; there was a theatrical production and a hand-drawn video piece; both versions completely justified the juxtaposition.

Kentridge's Ubu/perpetrator in the theatrical version was terrifyingly human: funny, bestial, compelling, charismatic and absolutely corrupt in a chillingly familiar way. Ubu in the play was a torturer in dirty tightie-whities, sorry for himself, immersed in his appetites and utterly oblivious to the reality of the people he victimized.

Well, maybe not to their reality. They just weren't as real to him as he was.

As we were watching the play, I hoped for an autopsy of the tragedy: to figure out What Went Wrong, like we all do in the face of the past. The comfortable answers I was looking for (something in the water, it's been taken care of) were, of course, not going to be given. The play didn't provide an easy answer, but the answer that it did provide was mind-bendingly universal. The text of the production is rooted in recent South African history, but Kentridge reported that audiences in Switzerland and Australia said it seemed to speak directly to their circumstances. Which is odd.

It might be true that in order to autopsy the crimes of the past we really don't have to look much further back than our own middle school experiences of bullying and being bullied. The people who do these things do it because they're encouraged to, because they can, and because they think the people they're hurting are, not less than human, but less human than they are. It might be that in order to commit atrocities, one needs not to completely dehumanize a person or population, but just to perceive it as less human than oneself. Which isn't so far away from being mean to waitresses.

Kentridge used himself as a model for a set of etchings about Ubu called Ubu Tells the Truth, and he talked about the fact that in the process of determining the truth about apartheid era atrocities, much of the evidence came from pictures and videos the perpetrators of the atrocities themselves had filmed. They turned in evidence that they themselves had kept in order to buy immunity from prosecution. It seems insane that they would have kept such evidence, but they did, and they complained about the petty inconveniences of being torturers. The smell of blood was all over their clothes.

It reminds me, since I work in academia, of the way that academics, including myself, adapt to the privileges of tenure and lose perspective on the real world. I'm all for academia- I think it's a place where, if one is focused and careful, one can buy the right to keep the best parts of one self and the culture alive, but I've also seen tenured professors complain about having to lick their own stamps. Which isn't exactly an atrocity (although it was atrocious), but it's an insensitivity that comes from having little bit of power for too long, so one can only imagine what happens when one has too much for a long time. Kentridge's talk brought home the idea that the people who thrive in conditions of atrocity are part of us. They're normal, and it might be that they're us, gone awry. It's not, I think, that one commits horrors by mistake, but that it takes effort not to fall in line, and that with enough narcissism and enough scope, we're all capable.

Yipes!

2007-04-07T08:40:00.000-04:00

Read this! Then donate to these people, fast!

Our congress people are too weak and stupid to allow aid organizations in Zambia to buy grain that's not produced in the US of A- the agribusiness and shipping lobbies think this is a great idea, but it means the food is going to run out for starving people in Zambia next month because it takes too long to get there from here. A bunch of people will die unless the aid organizations get enough private donations so they can buy Zambian grain. Until we can change this law, let's NOT be this guy.

New Romance

2007-03-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

I've been working on a new piece for a long time now, and I finally finished it this weekend. It's called New Romance, and there is a larger image and a succession of details on my site so that you can read the fine print.

The text relates to ideas I've been turning around in my head about the way we negotiate our identity through consumer goods. It's the same thing I was thinking about when I did Possessions, in a way, but in this case I was thinking in particular about my new car. I love my car, but I think it's entirely possible that it's more charismatic than I am. After all, it's got an advertising budget, a cultural aura, and a well developed narrative script. Me? Not so much.

The other day I was trying to figure out how to cook a frozen meal without a microwave. I went to the manufacturer's website and discovered that my pasta primavera was not just a meal, it was a lifestyle. And it comes with yoga, environmentalism, and a commitment to Reaching One's Personal Goals. Check it out. Thanks to the magic of the internet, my pasta primavera can even email me with daily reminders about my personal goal. Makes the rest of my food seem like it just doesn't care enough to go the extra mile.

New Romance is bigger than my other drawings, and the slight increase in scale meant that the image took forever to finish. Each letter took at least two days. I like the letters, but I really like the bugs. They seem innocent to me.

Which is not to say they're not going to sting you, but if they do, it won't be because of your "lifestyle choices."

I don't vouch for the mouse.

It's a viral thing?

2007-02-26T18:00:00.000-05:00

I've been suck in bed with a hideous flu for the last week and a half, so naturally when I got on the internet this morning I searched for "flu art." Which besides revealing a lot of images of people with kleenex on their noses led me to this page about Dutch artists called Graffiti Research Lab who are making laser graffiti. Check out their video of the process: it's pretty amazing stuff.

Fierlinger

2007-02-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

A couple nights ago I chanced upon a really amazing animation on television that kept me up past my bedtime. It was a sketchy loose narrative that was structured around people talking about their experiences when they were alone, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. It was gorgeous- beautifully written and drawn. It was the most moving animation I've seen since I first saw William Kentridge's work.

There's a little preview of the movie here: if you stick your fingers in your ears and don't listen to that movie announcer voice-over, you can get a little bit of the idea. It's called A Room Nearby, and it's a lot less simplistic than the voice over makes it seem.

It turns out that the animation was made by John and Sandra Fierlinger, who live in the suburbs of Philadelphia. John Fierlinger teaches animation at the University of Pennsylvania and turns out to have been responsible for some very funny little Sesame Street shorts that have a bit of a cult following. They were after my time, I think, but they're all on youtube, and you might recognize them: Teeny Little Super Guy. Being Canadian, though, I prefer this one, also from Sesame Street.

I can't wait to see his new movie, which is called Still Life With Animated Dogs. I bet it'll be great.

Let Time do the Work: Bread and Art

2007-02-06T21:28:00.000-05:00

rawing large has its drawbacks. I'm working on a piece that's significantly bigger than the ones I've done before, which means it is about as slow as molasses with a head cold. Yesterday it took six and a half hours of serious squinting to draw the letters ANCE. And half an M. Today I outlined an R in an hour and a half after work. I've had several days in which I have managed to get only one letter done, so I've had to gratify myself by indulging in a less irritating means of productivity.

In between drawing sessions, I made bread. The easiest, best bread ever, if I do say so myself. Which I do, but I'm not alone; people all over the country agree with me about this bread. Mark Bitman raved about this weirdly easy recipe for making incredible bread in his Minimalist column in the New York Times. The method was invented by Jim Lahey, of Sullivan Street Bakery, and it involves almost no labor on the part of the baker. There's a little video about how to make the bread online, and there was an article saying first, that it really is the best, easiest bread recipe ever, and second that it had changed people's lives. I'm not sure I'm profoundly different from the way I was pre-recipe, but I'm thinking I may have turned into someone who makes her own bread every week. This bread takes about 15 minutes of effort and makes a perfect round loaf that's better than anything I can buy in a bakery.

It's amazing stuff, and is so stupidly simple and unbelievably great that it's making up for the stupidly hard art that I'm making right now. Although it does take at least 15 1/2 hours to get one loaf of bread.

Here's the recipe, copied from the New York Times:

Recipe: No-Knead Bread
Published: November 8, 2006
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

New Drawings at Gallery Joe

2007-01-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

Gallery Joe, the gallery that sold my work in Miami last month, recently sold another one of my drawings. It's a small piece based on the Roman de la Rose, a medieval text that details the anatomy of love. It's a wonderful, irreverent story, and there are several places where you can read it online, including a site made by the Pierpont Morgan Library that will let you look at their medieval manuscripts page by page if you ask them nicely for a password.

I'm hard at work on a new large drawing and have finished another one called Possessions. I'm still making work with big and small text, so I put several details online so that people can read the small text. The piece is on my website here, and if you click the images on the website you can see details.

I do my drawings sitting in front of a window that looks out over my downstairs neighbor's roof. Right now my window offers a pretty grim view of my dead garden and my frozen birdbath, which I occasionally fill with hot water in order to break up the ice. Squirrels, cardinals, doves and fleets of sparrows show up to drink out of my birdbath when it's not iced over. This bird was drawn from life on a cold day when his feathers were all puffed up.

The other new piece on the site is Originality, a drawing I made when I was starting this series of word based images.

You can see it bigger online here. The detail below talks about some of the qualities of art that I want to see more often.

Becky Kerlin at Gallery Joe has both of these pieces in the gallery files right now, as well as some less recent drawings of what she very aptly refers to as "critters."

(There was a time when the animals I drew caused consternation to people who looked at my work: they were either rabbits or mice or bears, but it wasn't clear which. The best compromise came from a six year old boy who looked in the window of my studio at the Millay Colony and pronounced his solution to the dilemma with great authority. "Mousebears.")

Martin Ramirez

2007-01-21T20:04:00.000-05:00

The New York Times featured one of my favorite Martin Ramirez' drawings today: it was made in crayon on pasted together bits of paper, and it's incredible. Here's the NY Times' analysis of the painting, which comes from this article. Here's another one. The man's a genius.

Martin Ramirez, Courtyard, 1953 (ink and crayon on paper, Petullo Collection, Milwaukee)

Tu-whit, tu-whoo, what's happening, tu-whee

2007-01-13T21:59:00.000-05:00

Viktor Vasnetsov. Sirin (left) and Alkonost (right) Birds of Joy and Sorrow. 1896. Oil on canvas 133*250 Russian Museum

Starlings are samplers. They pick up sounds from their environment and incorporate them into their calls, mixing and elaborating on top of a basic sound in order to create progressively longer strands of song. The males sing more than the females, and the story is that the longer the song, the more likely he is to attract a mate.

Starlings living with humans are a particularly strange auditory experience. I first noticed starlings imitating humans in a parking lot outside Austin, where the birds were doing the characteristic "boop boop!" of the electronic door openers from suburban minivans, along with a sound I was sure was the slamming of a car door.

Starlings are all over the internet, and this bird, whose name is Weeewoo, is a Youtube celebrity: there are lots of Weewoo videos, including this one in which he actually seems to be doing a call and response of sorts with his owner. Weewoo even has a myspace page which has a huge number of friends and a list of "Weewoo Facts" which include the following:

I talk all day long.
I learn a new word about every 2 months.
I go outside and fly around.
I am a free bird.
I can leave at anytime.
I sleep in a china bowl above the refrigerator.
I put myself to bed at night.
I get myself up in the mornings.
I take 3 or 4 baths a day.
If the TV is too loud when I go to bed, I "SQUAWK" until someone turns it down.
I eat all the bugs in the house.

The people who adopt starlings and write about it on the web all tell a version of the baby-on-the-doorstep story. They find the fat-mouthed baby bird defenseless and parentless and try unsuccessfully to reintroduce it to nature. Lots of wildlife rehabilitators won't take starlings because they are an invasive species- one starling owner says that their local animal shelter actually executes the baby starlings rather than nurse them back to health and life in the wild.

However it happens, people clearly love their starlings, and their love ends up integrated into the bird's call: every single domesticated starling I could listen to on the web said some version of "Gimme a Kiss." It can go bad, as in this video of a Russian girl attempting to kiss her starling Malutka, who gets a rather emphatic (and from the looks of it, deserved) rebuke.

The compelling thing about Starling talk is the way they pick up the tone of voice of the people they live with. Listen to Damar, below, whose mutterings and repeated vocalizations of his name suggest an entirely different kind of human house.

The strangest starling speech I heard is this one, which comes from this page. It's like the bird has been raised by care bears in Munchkinland.

There are yet to be stories of orphan babies being raised in the wild by starlings, but the musical aspect of the phenomenon goes both ways. This page has lots of examples of composers who use bird songs in their works, and it talks in particular about Mozart, who had a starling of his own.

Mozart seems to have admired his avian companion's musical skills. One of his notebooks records a passage from the last movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major and the same passage as the starling revised it. The bird imitated it closely but changed the sharps to flats. "Das war schön"—That was beautiful!,— reads the comment in Mozart's hand.
When the starling died, Mozart held graveside ceremonies, singing hymns and reciting a poem he'd written for the fallen songster. Baptista agrees with two other ornithologists who have argued that Mozart's next composition, an odd sextet for strings and two horns, known as "A Musical Joke," shows starling style. Mozart wrote it only 8 days after the death of his bird, and it includes such starling-like bits as intertwined tunes, off-key recapitulations, and an abrupt ending.

Also, Baptista suggests new evidence for the starling's influence. He points out that starlings have the two-part syrinx, or voice organ, typical of songbirds and can belt out two songs at the same time. Baptista has even documented a starling simultaneously mimicking two birds—a grey fantail and a kelp gull—with the two sides of its syrinx. So, the final cadence of the sextet, essentially written in two keys played simultaneously, might honor the starling singing in two voices.

Oliver Messiaen, above, was a huge bird song fan. According to an article called Birdsong in Music by Trevor Hold ( Music & Letters, Vol. 52, No. 2. (Apr., 1971), pp. 113-122.), Messiaen dedicated "Reveil des Oiseaux" to a French ornithologist, a woman he knew, and to the "blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales, robins, chiffchaffs, blackcaps and all the birds of our woods."

The article disputes Messiaen's claims to have exactly relied on bird song, but also elaborates the extent to which Messiaen himself talked about stealing the songs of birds. In "Reveil des Oiseaux", Messiaen wrote in the preface, "There is nothing but bird songs in this work. All were heard in the forests and are perfectly authentic." The instrumental parts are based on the songs of specific birds, and the name of each bird is noted in the score below the instrument which represents it. Messiaen recommended that the pianist, in particular, should take walks in the woods to "get to know the original models" of the composition.

He wrote several compositions based on bird song, and the article quotes him saying,

It is in a spirit of no confidence in myself, or I mean in the human race, that I have taken bird-songs as a model. If you want symbols, let us go on to say that the bird is the symbol of freedom. We walk, he flies. We make war, he sings. Among birds most fights are settled by tournaments of song. Finally, despite my deep admiration for the folklore of the world, I doubt that one can find in any human music, however inspired, melodies and rhythms that have the sovereign freedom of bird-song.

Some of the best images of starlings, though, are of the birds in flocks. I especially like this one, not least for the human voices that sit stupidly below the amazing flight of these invader birds. Swarming starlings suggest that the birds speak another language beyond their own and ours: a written language that can only occasionally be glimpsed in the flight of a flock.